RHEL 6 : polkit (RHSA-2011:0455)

high Nessus Plugin ID 53500

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Synopsis

The remote Red Hat host is missing a security update for polkit.

Description

The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 6 host has packages installed that are affected by a vulnerability as referenced in the RHSA-2011:0455 advisory.

PolicyKit is a toolkit for defining and handling authorizations.

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. (CVE-2011-1485)

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.

Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux security advisory.

Note that Nessus has not tested for this issue but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

Solution

Update the RHEL polkit package based on the guidance in RHSA-2011:0455.

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 53500

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2011-0455.nasl

Version: 1.20

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Red Hat Local Security Checks

Published: 4/20/2011

Updated: 4/14/2025

Supported Sensors: Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Azure, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Agentless Assessment, Continuous Assessment, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: High

Score: 8.9

Vendor

Vendor Severity: Important

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 6.9

Temporal Score: 6

Vector: CVSS2#AV:L/AC:M/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2011-1485

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7

Temporal Score: 6.7

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:H/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:polkit, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:6, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:polkit-docs, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:polkit-desktop-policy, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:polkit-devel

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/RedHat/release, Host/RedHat/rpm-list, Host/cpu

Exploit Available: true

Exploit Ease: Exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 4/19/2011

Vulnerability Publication Date: 5/31/2011

Exploitable With

CANVAS (CANVAS)

Core Impact

Metasploit (Linux PolicyKit Race Condition Privilege Escalation)

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2011-1485

RHSA: 2011:0455

Detections

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