Description: The Qualys Research Team has discovered a memory corruption vulnerability in polkit’s pkexec, a SUID-root program that is installed by default on every major Linux distribution. This easily exploited vulnerability allows any unprivileged user to gain full root privileges on a vulnerable host by exploiting this vulnerability in its default configuration.
Details: 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.
CVSS: 7.8 - High
CVE: CVE-20-21-4034
Barracuda Networks: Barracuda CloudGen Firewall firmware versions 8.0.x and higher are vulnerable to the mentioned privilege escalations. The following hotfixes have been released for immediate mitigation:
- Hotfix 1069 - Firmware 8.2.1
- Hotfix 1068 - Firmware 8.0.5