Polkit Vulnerability CVE-2021-4034

Products

• CA API Gateway

Issue/Introduction

There has been a local privilege escalation vulnerability CVE-2021-4034 found on polkit's pkexec utility. The pkexec application is a setuid tool designed to allow unprivileged users to run commands as privileged users according to predefined policies.  The current version of pkexec doesn't handle the calling parameters count correctly and ends trying to execute environment variables as commands. An attacker can leverage this by crafting environment variables in such a way it will induce pkexec to execute arbitrary code. When successfully executed the attack can cause a local privilege escalation giving unprivileged users administrative rights on the target machine.

Is the API Gateway impacted by this vulnerability?

 

Environment

Gateway 10.x

Resolution

The impact of this CVE on the API Gateway seems to be very limited as long as we use local users to login to the appliance which is something we do recommend anyway.

The updated polkit package which addresses this vulnerability is included in the January 2022 Monthly Platform Patch. You can apply this January 2022 or any other latest monthly platform patch.

Here is the link for the solutions and patches page: https://support.broadcom.com/web/ecx/support-content-notification/-/external/content/release-announcements/CA-API-Gateway-Solutions--Patches/3024

 

Additional Information

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2021-4034