Two Local Privilege Escalation Flaws Discovered in Linux
Qualys researchers have discovered two local privilege escalation vulnerabilities that allow hackers to gain root privileges on major Linux distributions.
It's time for another round of vulnerabilities discovered in the wild. This time, it's two local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerabilities that affect SSH and libblockdev – both of which are found in most major Linux distributions.
The vulnerabilities in question are CVE-2025-6018 (which allows a hacker to impersonate a user via SSH) and CVE-2025-6019 (which is exploitable via the udisks service and allows a user to escalate access to root privileges).
Pumpkin Chang, a security researcher at DEVCORE who focuses on Linux kernel security, discusses these issues in depth in his blog. Chang explains D-Bus and Polkit and how these mechanisms are leveraged to perform certain operations by impersonating actual users.
Additionally, a report from Qualys' senior manager, Saeed Abbasi, discusses both LPE flaws. Abbassi says, “These modern ‘local-to-root’ exploits have collapsed the gap between an ordinary logged-in user and a full system takeover.”
Abbasi continues, "By chaining legitimate services such as udisks loop-mounts and PAM/environment quirks, attackers who own any active GUI or SSH session can vault across polkit’s allow_active trust zone and emerge as root in seconds." Finally, he adds, "Nothing exotic is required: each link is pre-installed on mainstream Linux distros and their server builds."
The key here is "Nothing exotic is required." In other words, these vulnerabilities don't require any non-standard tools to exploit.
As far as mitigation is concerned, Abbassi states, "To mitigate this vulnerability, modify the polkit rule for ‘org.freedesktop.udisks2.modify-device’. Change the allow_active setting from yes to auth_admin."
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