ALAS2023-2023-026


Amazon Linux 2023 Security Advisory: ALAS-2023-026
Advisory Release Date: 2023-02-17 20:43 Pacific
Advisory Updated Date: 2023-02-22 23:55 Pacific
Severity: Important

Issue Overview:

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. (CVE-2021-4034)

There is a flaw in polkit which can allow an unprivileged user to cause polkit to crash, due to process file descriptor exhaustion.
The highest threat from this vulnerability is to availability. NOTE: Polkit process outage duration is tied to the failing process being reaped and a new one being spawned. (CVE-2021-4115)


Affected Packages:

polkit


Issue Correction:
Run dnf update polkit --releasever=2023.0.20230222 to update your system.

New Packages:
aarch64:
    polkit-libs-debuginfo-0.117-10.amzn2023.0.3.aarch64
    polkit-devel-0.117-10.amzn2023.0.3.aarch64
    polkit-debuginfo-0.117-10.amzn2023.0.3.aarch64
    polkit-libs-0.117-10.amzn2023.0.3.aarch64
    polkit-0.117-10.amzn2023.0.3.aarch64
    polkit-debugsource-0.117-10.amzn2023.0.3.aarch64

noarch:
    polkit-docs-0.117-10.amzn2023.0.3.noarch

src:
    polkit-0.117-10.amzn2023.0.3.src

x86_64:
    polkit-libs-debuginfo-0.117-10.amzn2023.0.3.x86_64
    polkit-debuginfo-0.117-10.amzn2023.0.3.x86_64
    polkit-devel-0.117-10.amzn2023.0.3.x86_64
    polkit-libs-0.117-10.amzn2023.0.3.x86_64
    polkit-0.117-10.amzn2023.0.3.x86_64
    polkit-debugsource-0.117-10.amzn2023.0.3.x86_64