SARA / Free Tools / KEV / CVE-2021-4034

CVE-2021-4034 on CISA KEV

A local privilege escalation vulnerability was found on polkit's pkexec utility. The pkexec application is a setuid tool designed to allow unprivileged users to run commands as privileged users according predefined policies. The current version of pkexec doesn't handle

CISA KEV — Actively Exploited

Red Hat Polkit Out-of-Bounds Read and Write Vulnerability

Vendor / Product
— / Red Hat / Polkit
Added to KEV
2022-06-27
BOD 22-01 due
2022-07-18
Ransomware use
Unknown
CVSS / EPSS
— — · EPSS 87.81%

01What CISA says about this vulnerability

A local privilege escalation vulnerability was found on polkit's pkexec utility. The pkexec application is a setuid tool designed to allow unprivileged users to run commands as privileged users according predefined policies. The current version of pkexec doesn't handle the calling parameters count correctly and ends trying to execute environment variables as commands. An attacker can leverage…

02Required action — verbatim from CISA

Apply updates per vendor instructions.

03Notes & references

04SARA's analyst layer — why this matters

This vulnerability is currently on the CISA KEV list, which CISA only adds CVEs to when there is reliable evidence of active exploitation in the wild. For federal civilian agencies, BOD 22-01 requires remediation by the due date above. For everyone else, KEV is the strongest "patch immediately" signal you can get from public threat intel.

05Affected products (summary)

VendorProductVersions
na / polkitall

06Detection

Open the Sigma generator with a pre-filled prompt for this CVE to draft a starting detection:

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