RHEL 7 : polkit (RHSA-2016:0189)

high Nessus Plugin ID 88788

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Synopsis

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

Description

The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 7 host has packages installed that are affected by a vulnerability as referenced in the RHSA-2016:0189 advisory.

PolicyKit is a toolkit for defining and handling authorizations.

A denial of service flaw was found in how polkit handled authorization requests. A local, unprivileged user could send malicious requests to polkit, which could then cause the polkit daemon to corrupt its memory and crash. (CVE-2015-3256)

All polkit users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain a backported patch 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-2016:0189.

Plugin Details

Severity: High

ID: 88788

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2016-0189.nasl

Version: 2.13

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Red Hat Local Security Checks

Published: 2/17/2016

Updated: 4/15/2025

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

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Medium

Score: 5.9

Vendor

Vendor Severity: Moderate

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 4.6

Temporal Score: 3.4

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

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2015-3256

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: High

Base Score: 7.8

Temporal Score: 6.8

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

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

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:polkit-docs, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:polkit-devel, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:7, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:polkit

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

Exploit Ease: No known exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 2/16/2016

Vulnerability Publication Date: 10/26/2015

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2015-3256

RHSA: 2016:0189

Detections

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