CVE-2021-4115

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2022-02-21 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-400

Description

There is a flaw in polkit which can allow an unprivileged user to cause polkit to crash, due to process file descriptor exhaustion. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to availability. NOTE: Polkit process outage duration is tied to the failing process being reaped and a new one being spawned

Affected products

Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 20.04, 21.10
Debian Linux: 11.0
Fedoraproject Fedora: 34, 35
Oracle Corporation Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance Kit: 8.8
Polkit Project Polkit: 0.117
Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 8.0

References

http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/172849/polkit-File-Descriptor-Exhaustion.html
https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2021-4115
https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/rpms/polkit/-/merge_requests/6/diffs?commit_id=bf900df04dc390d389e59aa10942b0f2b15c531e
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/polkit/polkit/-/issues/141
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/VGKWCBS6IDZYYDYM2WIWJM5BL7QQTWPF/
https://www.oracle.com/security-alerts/cpujul2022.html
http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/172849/polkit-File-Descriptor-Exhaustion.html
https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2021-4115
https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/rpms/polkit/-/merge_requests/6/diffs?commit_id=bf900df04dc390d389e59aa10942b0f2b15c531e
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/polkit/polkit/-/issues/141
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/VGKWCBS6IDZYYDYM2WIWJM5BL7QQTWPF/
https://www.oracle.com/security-alerts/cpujul2022.html

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