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.