CVE-2011-1485

medium

Published 2011-05-31 · Modified 2026-04-29

💬 Discuss on Community ✚ Propose mitigation

CVSS v3

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CVSS v4 NEW

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not yet in upstream

VIR risk

7.9

Description

Race condition in the pkexec utility and polkitd daemon in PolicyKit (aka polkit) 0.96 allows local users to gain privileges by executing a setuid program from pkexec, related to the use of the effective user ID instead of the real user ID.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

20%

Patch ETA

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Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

Exploits

Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.

Exploit-DB

EDB-35021 local linux verified

Metasploit · 2014-10-20

Linux PolicyKit - Race Condition Privilege Escalation (Metasploit)

Source code queued for fetch — refresh in a moment.

EDB-17942 local linux

xi4oyu · 2011-10-08

pkexec - Race Condition Privilege Escalation

Source code queued for fetch — refresh in a moment.

EDB-17932 local linux

zx2c4 · 2011-10-05

PolicyKit polkit-1 < 0.101 - Local Privilege Escalation

Source code queued for fetch — refresh in a moment.

Metasploit modules

exploit_linux/local/pkexec rank 500

Linux PolicyKit Race Condition Privilege Escalation

Source fetch failed: fetch_error — view the original via the link above.

OS impact

Debian Fixed 5 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
trixie	Fixed	`0.101-4`
sid	Fixed	`0.101-4`
forky	Fixed	`0.101-4`
bullseye	Fixed	`0.101-4`
bookworm	Fixed	`0.101-4`

Application impact

Vendor	Product	Versions	Fixed
redhat	policykit	`0.96`

References

CWEs

CWE-362

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.