Polkit is a system authorization framework widely deployed across Linux distributions and desktop environments to manage privileged operations and policy enforcement. Despite a narrow product footprint, its deep integration into the privilege-escalation path means vulnerabilities carry outsized impact; the vendor's disclosures have an elevated tendency to be confirmed in-the-wild exploits and publicly available, reflecting the framework's accessibility as a target for privilege escalation. The recurring exposure clusters around race conditions, authorization logic flaws, input validation, and error-handling gaps that are characteristic of code mediating trust boundaries between user and kernel contexts. Current exploitation activity and exposure counts are shown alongside this summary.
The number and severity of CVEs published that impact products developed by Polkit Project over time
Signals from CVEs in this vendor scope (11 CVEs).
11 CVEs · Highest risk first
| CVE | Published | CVSS | Risk | KEV | Exploit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
CVE-2021-4034HIGH 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 pri | Jan 28, 2022 | 7.8 | 98 | YES | YES |
CVE-2021-3560HIGH 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 us | Feb 16, 2022 | 7.8 | 87 | YES | YES |
CVE-2018-19788HIGH 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. | Dec 3, 2018 | 8.8 | 34 | NO | NO |
CVE-2021-4115MEDIUM 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 | Feb 21, 2022 | 5.5 | 21 | NO | NO |
CVE-2019-6133MEDIUM 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. Th | Jan 11, 2019 | 6.7 | 19 | NO | NO |
CVE-2018-1116MEDIUM 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 authentic | Jul 10, 2018 | 4.4 | 19 | NO | NO |
CVE-2013-4288HIGH 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 authoriz | Oct 3, 2013 | 7.2 | 18 | NO | NO |
CVE-2015-4625MEDIUM 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 connecti | Oct 26, 2015 | 4.6 | 14 | NO | NO |
CVE-2015-3256MEDIUM 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 vector | Oct 26, 2015 | 4.6 | 14 | NO | NO |
CVE-2015-3255MEDIUM 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 duplic | Oct 26, 2015 | 4.6 | 14 | NO | NO |
Signals from CVEs in this vendor scope (11 CVEs).
An overview of all social media posts that mention a CVE ID that affects a product developed by Polkit Project.
Media articles that mention a CVE ID that affects a product developed by Polkit Project — matched by CVE ID, not by vendor name.