policykit-1 vulnerability

19 April 2011

policykit-1 vulnerability

A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:

• Ubuntu 10.10
• Ubuntu 10.04 LTS
• Ubuntu 9.10

Summary

Local users could gain root access by using the pkexec tool in PolicyKit.

Software Description

• policykit-1 - framework for managing administrative policies and privileges

Details

Neel Mehta discovered that PolicyKit did not correctly verify the user making authorization requests. A local attacker could exploit this to trick pkexec into running applications with root privileges.

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 10.10

libpolkit-backend-1-0 - 0.96-2ubuntu1.1

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

libpolkit-backend-1-0 - 0.96-2ubuntu0.1

Ubuntu 9.10

libpolkit-backend-1-0 - 0.94-1ubuntu1.1

To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.

After a standard system update you need to reboot your computer to make all the necessary changes.

References

• CVE-2011-1485