CVE-2026-4897: Freedesktop Polkit

Medium severity, CVSS 5.5. EPSS: 0.2% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

A flaw was found in polkit. A local user can exploit this by providing a specially crafted, excessively long input to the `polkit-agent-helper-1` setuid binary via standard input (stdin). This unbounded input can lead to an out-of-memory (OOM) condition, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) for the system.

Affected products

• Freedesktop Polkit: affected versions not specified
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: version 6.0 only; version 7.0 only; version 8.0 only; version 9.0 only; version 10.0 only
• Red Hat Openshift Container Platform: version 4.0 only

Published 2026-03-26. Last modified 2026-09-10.