What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-3560: Red Hat Polkit Incorrect Authorization Vulnerability

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: yes — in CISA KEV since 2023-05-12
• EPSS: 23.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2022-02-16 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-863

Description

It was found that polkit could be tricked into bypassing the credential checks for D-Bus requests, elevating the privileges of the requestor to the root user. This flaw could be used by an unprivileged local attacker to, for example, create a new local administrator. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to data confidentiality and integrity as well as system availability.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 20.04
• Debian Linux: 11.0
• Polkit Project Polkit: before 0.119 — fixed in 0.119
• Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.18: 4.7
• RedHat Virtualization: 4.0
• RedHat Virtualization Host: 4.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Polkit Project Polkit 0.119. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/172836/polkit-Authentication-Bypass.html
• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/172846/Facebook-Fizz-Denial-Of-Service.html
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1961710
• https://github.blog/2021-06-10-privilege-escalation-polkit-root-on-linux-with-bug/
• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/172836/polkit-Authentication-Bypass.html
• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/172846/Facebook-Fizz-Denial-Of-Service.html
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1961710
• https://github.blog/2021-06-10-privilege-escalation-polkit-root-on-linux-with-bug/
• https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog?field_cve=CVE-2021-3560

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