Pwnkit is a vulnerability that uses a bug in polkit to elevate permissions to root. This write-up shows how to reproduce it using Ubuntu and what to do to check whether a system is vulnerable. What went wrong? Quoting from the original researchers: This vulnerability is an attacker’s dream come true: pkexec is installed by default on all major Linux distributions; pkexec is vulnerable since its creation, in May 2009; any unprivileged local user can exploit this vulnerability to obtain full ...
