Updated polkit packages that fix one security issue are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having important security impact. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System 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 race condition was found in the way the PolicyKit pkcheck utility checked process authorization when the process was specified by its process ID via the --process option. A local user could use this flaw to bypass intended PolicyKit authorizations and escalate their privileges. Note: Applications that invoke pkcheck with the --process option need to be modified to use the pid,pid-start-time,uid argument for that option, to allow pkcheck to check process authorization correctly. Red Hat would like to thank Sebastian Krahmer of the SUSE Security Team for reporting this issue. 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.