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.

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.

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

gksu-polkit-0.0.3-6.fc18 was reported as fixing the issue in CVE-2012-5617 but the patch was improperly applied and it did not fixed the security issue.

gksu-polkit: permissive PolicyKit policy configuration file allows privilege escalation

In gksu-polkit before 0.0.3, the source file for xauth may contain arbitrary commands that may allow an attacker to overtake an administrator X11 session.

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 PolicyKit (aka polkit) 0.115 that allows a user with a uid greater than INT_MAX to successfully execute any systemctl command.

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.

pkexec, when used with --user nonpriv, allows local users to escape to the parent session via a crafted TIOCSTI ioctl call, which pushes characters to the terminal's input buffer.