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.
Basically it’s two vulns chained; first one gives a remote user privileges that a physically present user would get, in order to do things like put a thumbdrive in and have it mount. Then that udisks privilege can be subverted to escalate that level to root. So as long as you can start a remote session, you can pull root and it doesn’t even look that hard.
They probably can not. Unless you’ve setup your router such that anyone can connect to an ssh instance running on your PC, and then also use a bad password. Public wifi + having something like ssh running + having a bad password.
Your PC probably doesn’t satisfy these requirements (yay!), but some servers might.
I recognize a few of those words.
Basically it’s two vulns chained; first one gives a remote user privileges that a physically present user would get, in order to do things like put a thumbdrive in and have it mount. Then that udisks privilege can be subverted to escalate that level to root. So as long as you can start a remote session, you can pull root and it doesn’t even look that hard.
So how would a bad actor start a remote session on my Linux pc?
Edited to add, downvoted for trying to learn is a new one for me.
They probably can not. Unless you’ve setup your router such that anyone can connect to an ssh instance running on your PC, and then also use a bad password. Public wifi + having something like ssh running + having a bad password.
Your PC probably doesn’t satisfy these requirements (yay!), but some servers might.
I do run some servers, but use robust passwords.