CVE-2021-3560 vulnerability in Polkitproject and Other Products
Published on February 16, 2022

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.

Vendor Advisory NVD

Known Exploited Vulnerability

This Red Hat Polkit Incorrect Authorization Vulnerability is part of CISA's list of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities. Red Hat Polkit contains an incorrect authorization vulnerability through the bypassing of credential checks for D-Bus requests, allowing for privilege escalation.

The following remediation steps are recommended / required by June 2, 2023: Apply updates per vendor instructions.

Vulnerability Analysis

CVE-2021-3560 is exploitable with local system access, and requires small amount of user privileges. This vulnerability is considered to have a low attack complexity. It has an exploitability score of 1.8 out of four. The potential impact of an exploit of this vulnerability is considered to be very high.

Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions

The software does not check or incorrectly checks for unusual or exceptional conditions that are not expected to occur frequently during day to day operation of the software.

Products Associated with CVE-2021-3560

You can be notified by stack.watch whenever vulnerabilities like CVE-2021-3560 are published in these products:

Polkitproject Polkit

Debian Linux

Canonical Ubuntu Linux

What versions are vulnerable to CVE-2021-3560?

Polkitproject Polkit Fixed in Version 0.119

Debian Linux Version 11.0

Canonical Ubuntu Linux Version 20.04