CVSS v3.1
7.8
EPSS
94.92%
Published
Jan 28, 2022
Modified
Nov 6, 2025
CISA Known Exploited Vulnerability
Added: 2022-06-27 · Due: 2022-07-18
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Public PoC / Exploit (10)
All weaponized →Links to public security research (Exploit-DB, Nuclei, Trickest, GitHub) for defensive use only.
Description
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 this by crafting environment variables in such a way it'll induce pkexec to execute arbitrary code. When successfully executed the attack can cause a local privilege escalation given unprivileged users administrative rights on the target machine.
CVSS Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:HWeaknesses (CWE)
Affected Products (55)
References (20)
...and 5 more