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Local Privilege Escalation in polkits pkexec

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Local Privilege Escalation in polkits pkexec

Disclosed
01/25/2022
Created
03/03/2022

Description

A bug exists in the polkit pkexec binary in how it processes arguments. If the binary is provided with no arguments, it will continue to process environment variables as argument variables, but without any security checking. By using the execve call we can specify a null argument list and populate the proper environment variables. This exploit is architecture independent.

Author(s)

  • Qualys Security
  • Andris Raugulis
  • Dhiraj Mishra
  • bwatters-r7

Platform

Linux

Development

Module Options

To display the available options, load the module within the Metasploit console and run the commands 'show options' or 'show advanced':

msf > use exploit/linux/local/cve_2021_4034_pwnkit_lpe_pkexec
msf exploit(cve_2021_4034_pwnkit_lpe_pkexec) > show targets
    ...targets...
msf exploit(cve_2021_4034_pwnkit_lpe_pkexec) > set TARGET < target-id >
msf exploit(cve_2021_4034_pwnkit_lpe_pkexec) > show options
    ...show and set options...
msf exploit(cve_2021_4034_pwnkit_lpe_pkexec) > exploit

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