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CVE-2021-4034 Polkit: Emulation and Detection

In this lab, you’ll learn how to emulate, detect, and mitigate attacks against vulnerable instances of policy-kit. When you’re finished, you'll not only know how to exploit CVE-2021-4034, you'll also be able to protect against real-world attacks.

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Labs

Path Info

Level
Clock icon Beginner
Duration
Clock icon 1h 10m
Published
Clock icon Aug 15, 2024

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Table of Contents

  1. Challenge

    Getting Started in the Lab Environment

    Here are the initial instructions and explanation of the lab environment. Read this while your environment is busy creating itself from nothing. Yes, this violates physics; we know. How fun!

  2. Challenge

    Emulating an Attack Against Polkit

    In this section, we begin with the challenge: emulating an attack against a vulnerable Linux system. The challenge consists of a brief overview of the Polkit privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2021-4034) followed by a hands-on exercise.

  3. Challenge

    Detecting Attacks Against Polkit

    Armed with the knowledge of how to exploit the Polkit vulnerability, you're ready to proceed to the next challenge: detecting exploitation. The challenge consists of another hands-on exercise, where you'll leverage system access logs to discover indicators of compromise from previous attacks.

  4. Challenge

    Preventing Attacks Against Polkit

    With the knowledge of how to emulate and detect attacks, you're now ready to begin the final challenge, where you'll learn how to leverage simple and effective techniques to mitigate future privilege escalation attacks. The challenge consists of a hands-on exercise, whereby the Polkit SUID bit is configured to prevent further attacks using native Linux commands.

  5. Challenge

    The Last Challenge.

    Welcome to the final challenge! This is your last chance to experiment in the environment. Clicking Finish Lab will end this little world that flittered into existence just for you.

West is an infosec professional specializing in offensive security. He serves as the team lead for the Commonwealth of Kentucky's enterprise red team and has over a decade of IT experience.

What's a lab?

Hands-on Labs are real environments created by industry experts to help you learn. These environments help you gain knowledge and experience, practice without compromising your system, test without risk, destroy without fear, and let you learn from your mistakes. Hands-on Labs: practice your skills before delivering in the real world.

Provided environment for hands-on practice

We will provide the credentials and environment necessary for you to practice right within your browser.

Guided walkthrough

Follow along with the author’s guided walkthrough and build something new in your provided environment!

Did you know?

On average, you retain 75% more of your learning if you get time for practice.