CVE-2021-4034 - CVE House
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Status published Unknown CVE-2021-4034

A local privilege escalation vulnerability was found on polkit's pkexec...

Vulnerability 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.

Impact Analysis

Refer to official advisory for detailed impact metrics.

Remediation

Ensure systems are updated to the latest vendor-supplied patch levels.

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Credits & Attribution

No credits recorded in the NVD database.

Affected Vendor

Affected Software

polkit
Vulnerable Versions:
all

Timeline

Official Publish: January 28th, 2022
Last Modified: October 21st, 2025
Added to House: July 21st, 2026

CVSS Vectors

No vector data available

Weaknesses (CWE)