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
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.
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.
In PolicyKit (aka polkit) 0.115, the "start time" protection mechanism can be bypassed because fork() is not atomic, and therefore authorization decisions are improperly cached. This is related to lack of uid checking in polkitbackend/polkitbackendinteractiveauthority.c.
A flaw was found in polkit before version 0.116. The implementation of the polkit_backend_interactive_authority_check_authorization function in polkitd allows to test for authentication and trigger authentication of unrelated processes owned by other users. This may result in a local DoS and information disclosure.
Integer overflow in the authentication_agent_new_cookie function in PolicyKit (aka polkit) before 0.113 allows local users to gain privileges by creating a large number of connections, which triggers the issuance of a duplicate cookie value.
PolicyKit (aka polkit) before 0.113 allows local users to cause a denial of service (memory corruption and polkitd daemon crash) and possibly gain privileges via unspecified vectors, related to "javascript rule evaluation."
The polkit_backend_action_pool_init function in polkitbackend/polkitbackendactionpool.c in PolicyKit (aka polkit) before 0.113 might allow local users to gain privileges via duplicate action IDs in action descriptions.
The authentication_agent_new function in polkitbackend/polkitbackendinteractiveauthority.c in PolicyKit (aka polkit) before 0.113 allows local users to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference and polkitd daemon crash) by calling RegisterAuthenticationAgent with an invalid object path.
Race condition in PolicyKit (aka polkit) allows local users to bypass intended PolicyKit restrictions and gain privileges by starting a setuid or pkexec process before the authorization check is performed, related to (1) the polkit_unix_process_new API function, (2) the dbus API, or (3) the --process (unix-process) option for authorization to pkcheck.