CVE-2021-4115: Canonical Ubuntu Linux

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 0.5% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

There is a flaw in polkit which can allow an unprivileged user to cause polkit to crash, due to process file descriptor exhaustion. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to availability. NOTE: Polkit process outage duration is tied to the failing process being reaped and a new one being spawned

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: version 20.04 only; version 21.10 only
• Debian Debian Linux: version 11.0 only
• Fedoraproject Fedora: version 34 only; version 35 only
• Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance Kit: version 8.8 only
• Polkit Project Polkit: version 0.117 only
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: version 8.0 only

Published 2022-02-21. Last modified 2026-06-17.