debian · CVE-2021-4034

Quick triage

Priority: not yet assigned Published: Updated: Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:09:35 GMT

View at Official debian advisory, NVD, CVE.org · CVE detail

Freshness: upstream tracker timestamp is available; use API updated time as primary recency signal.

Tracker summary

CVE-2021-4034 not yet assigned priority: Debian including 1 source packages (policykit-1), 5 status rows across 5 suites (bookworm, bullseye, forky, sid, trixie): resolved 5.

Description:

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.

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