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Labs

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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Lab Info
Level
Beginner
Last updated
Jul 30, 2025
Duration
1h 10m

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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.

About the author

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.

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