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.
Is CVE-2021-4034 exploited?
Listed in the CISA KEV catalog on 2022-06-27.
Federal remediation due 2022-07-18.
Past that date by 1489 days.
EPSS puts exploitation in the next 30 days at 95%.