CVE-2025-7519: Polkit: xml policy file with a large number of nested elements may lead to out-of-bounds write

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.7 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2025-07-14 · updated 2026-09-01
Weakness: CWE-787

Description

A flaw was found in polkit. When processing an XML policy with 32 or more nested elements in depth, an out-of-bounds write can be triggered. This issue can lead to a crash or other unexpected behavior, and arbitrary code execution is not discarded. To exploit this flaw, a high-privilege account is needed as it's required to place the malicious policy file properly.

Affected products

Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, 9.0, 10.0
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.18: 4.0

References

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2025-7519
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2379675
https://github.com/polkit-org/polkit/commit/107d3801361b9f9084f78710178e683391f1d245
https://github.com/polkit-org/polkit/pull/570

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