CVE-2016-2568: Freedesktop Polkit

High severity, CVSS 7.8. EPSS: 0.4% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

pkexec, when used with --user nonpriv, allows local users to escape to the parent session via a crafted TIOCSTI ioctl call, which pushes characters to the terminal's input buffer.

Affected products

• Freedesktop Polkit: any version
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: version 6.0 only; version 7.0 only

Published 2017-02-13. Last modified 2026-10-08.