The PwnKit vulnerability: Overview, detection, and remediation

On January 25, 2022, Qualys announced the discovery of a local privilege escalation vulnerability that it identified as PwnKit. The PwnKit vulnerability affects PolicyKit’s pkexec, a SUID-root program installed by default on many Linux distributions. The same day of the announcement, a proof of concept (PoC) exploit was built and published by the security research community. Qualys claims that this vulnerability is present on default installations of major Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and CentOS. According to CVETrends …

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