CVE-2021-4034

What the flaw is

The Red Hat polkit pkexec utility contains an out-of-bounds read and write vulnerability that allows for privilege escalation with administrative rights.

Description as published by CISA. We have not independently reproduced it.

What CISA requires

Apply updates per vendor instructions.

This deadline is binding on US federal civilian agencies under BOD 22-01. It is not a legal deadline for anyone else, but it is a useful urgency signal — CISA sets it by how actively the flaw is being used, not by CVSS.

Public exploit code

561 public repositories referencing this CVE have been catalogued on GitHub. That volume usually means a reliable, widely-reproduced exploit. Treat this as a strong signal to prioritise patching, not as a verified working exploit — many such repositories are scanners, write-ups or forks rather than functional code.

• 0day404/vulnerability-poc
• 0x01-sec/CVE-2021-4034-
• 0x05a/my-cve-2021-4034-poc
• 0x4ndy/CVE-2021-4034-PoC
• 0x7n6/OSCP
• 0xD13/OSCP-Prep-Guide
• 0xMarcio/cve
• 0xNix/CVE-2021-4034

Showing 8 of 561. Full list in the trickest/cve dataset.

Vendor advisories

• nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-4034

Primary sources

• NVD entry — CVSS score, CPE list and references
• CISA KEV catalog — the source for this page
• CVE Record at cve.org