Packagekit

PackageKit is a a D-Bus abstraction layer that allows the user to manage packages in a secure way using a cross-distro, cross-architecture API. PackageKit between and including versions 1.0.2 and 1.3.4 is vulnerable to a time-of-check time-of-use (TOCTOU) race condition on transaction flags that allows unprivileged users to install packages as root and thus leads to a local privilege escalation. This is patched in version 1.3.5. A local unprivileged user can install arbitrary RPM packages as root, including executing RPM scriptlets, without authentication. The vulnerability is a TOCTOU race condition on `transaction->cached_transaction_flags` combined with a silent state-machine guard that discards illegal backward transitions while leaving corrupted flags in place. Three bugs exist in `src/pk-transaction.c`: 1. Unconditional flag overwrite (line 4036): `InstallFiles()` writes caller-supplied flags to `transaction->cached_transaction_flags` without checking whether the transaction has already been authorized/started. A second call blindly overwrites the flags even while the transaction is RUNNING. 2. Silent state-transition rejection (lines 873–882): `pk_transaction_set_state()` silently discards backward state transitions (e.g. `RUNNING` → `WAITING_FOR_AUTH`) but the flag overwrite at step 1 already happened. The transaction continues running with corrupted flags. 3. Late flag read at execution time (lines 2273–2277): The scheduler's idle callback reads cached_transaction_flags at dispatch time, not at authorization time. If flags were overwritten between authorization and execution, the backend sees the attacker's flags.

Published: 2026-04-22T13:11:40.174Z
Updated: 2026-07-15T00:58:55.389Z

A use-after-free flaw was found in PackageKitd. In some conditions, the order of cleanup mechanics for a transaction could be impacted. As a result, some memory access could occur on memory regions that were previously freed. Once freed, a memory region can be reused for other allocations and any previously stored data in this memory region is considered lost.

Published: 2024-01-03T17:04:37.841Z
Updated: 2026-11-06T13:41:04.418Z

A flaw was found in PackageKit in the way some of the methods exposed by the Transaction interface examines files. This issue allows a local user to measure the time the methods take to execute and know whether a file owned by root or other users exists.

Published: 2022-06-28T16:09:26.000Z
Updated: 2026-10-08T21:14:00.039Z

An authentication bypass flaw has been found in PackageKit before 1.1.10 that allows users without administrator privileges to install signed packages. A local attacker can use this vulnerability to install vulnerable packages to further compromise a system.

Published: 2018-04-23T20:00:00.000Z
Updated: 2024-09-16T16:18:44.131Z

The Zypper (aka zypp) backend in PackageKit before 0.8.8 allows local users to downgrade packages via the "install updates" method.

Published: 2014-04-16T18:00:00.000Z
Updated: 2024-08-06T15:13:32.383Z