Linux System Service Bug Allows You to Gain Root Access

An authentication bypass vulnerability in the polkit auth system service, which is installed by default on many recent Linux distributions, allows unprivileged attackers to gain a root shell. On June 3, 2021, the polkit local privilege escalation flaw (CVE-2021-3560) was officially identified, and a fix was released. Polkit is used by systemd, hence it’s included in any Linux distribution that uses systemd. 

Kevin Backhouse, a GitHub security researcher, detailed how he discovered the bug (CVE-2021-3560) in a systemd service called polkit in a blog post on Thursday. The problem, which was first introduced in commit bfa5036 seven years ago and first shipped in polkit version 0.113, took various pathways in different Linux distributions. Despite the fact that many Linux distributions did not ship with the vulnerable polkit version until recently, any Linux machine with polkit 0.113 or later installed is vulnerable to attacks. 

Polkit, formerly known as PolicyKit, is a service that determines whether certain Linux tasks require more privileges than there are currently available. It comes into play when you want to establish a new user account, for example. According to Backhouse, exploiting the issue is shockingly simple, needing only a few commands utilizing common terminal tools such as bash, kill, and dbus-send. 

“The vulnerability is triggered by starting a dbus-send command but killing it while polkit is still in the middle of processing the request,” explained Backhouse. Polkit asks for the UID of a connection that no longer exists, therefore killing dbus-send — an interprocess communication command – in the middle of an authentication request creates an error (because the connection was killed). 

“In fact, polkit mishandles the error in a particularly unfortunate way: rather than rejecting the request, it treats the request as though it came from a process with UID 0,” explains Backhouse. “In other words, it immediately authorizes the request because it thinks the request has come from a root process.”

Because polkit’s UID query to the dbus-daemon occurs numerous times throughout different code paths, this doesn’t happen all of the time. According to Backhouse, those code pathways usually handle the error correctly, but one is vulnerable, and if the disconnection occurs while that code path is running, privilege escalation occurs. It’s all about timing, which varies in unanticipated ways due to the involvement of various processes. Backhouse believes the bug’s intermittent nature is why it went unnoticed for seven years.