RHSA-2016:0189 — Security Advisory

Updated polkit packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having Moderate security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available from the CVE link in the References section.

PolicyKit is a toolkit for defining and handling authorizations.

A denial of service flaw was found in how polkit handled authorization requests. A local, unprivileged user could send malicious requests to polkit, which could then cause the polkit daemon to corrupt its memory and crash. (CVE-2015-3256)

All polkit users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain a backported patch to correct this issue. The system must be rebooted for this update to take effect.