B.70. polkit
Updated polkit packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having important security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link(s) associated with each description below.
PolicyKit is a toolkit for defining and handling authorizations.
- CVE-2011-1485
- A race condition flaw was found in the PolicyKit pkexec utility and polkitd daemon. A local user could use this flaw to appear as a privileged user to pkexec, allowing them to execute arbitrary commands as root by running those commands with pkexec.
Red Hat would like to thank Neel Mehta of Google for reporting this issue.
All polkit users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct this issue. The system must be rebooted for this update to take effect.
