ly4k/PwnKit

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

1326 stars · 206 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

A self-contained exploit for CVE-2021-4034 (PwnKit), a local privilege escalation vulnerability in polkit's pkexec. It ships as a prebuilt binary and one-liner script that grants a root shell on vulnerable Linux distributions.

Use cases

• exploit CVE-2021-4034 pkexec local privilege escalation
• test whether a Linux host is patched against PwnKit
• get a root shell on a vulnerable Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, or CentOS machine
• demonstrate polkit privilege escalation in a pentest report
• verify patch effectiveness by running the exploit against patched systems

When to choose

• you need a self-contained, dependency-free exploit binary that works out of the box
• you are validating whether systems are vulnerable to PwnKit during a security assessment
• you want a one-liner or single-command exploit for CVE-2021-4034

When to avoid

• the target system has already been patched for CVE-2021-4034
• you need a general privilege-escalation enumeration tool rather than a single-CVE exploit
• you are not authorized to test the target system

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

security penetration-testing cli security penetration-testing operating-systems cli c cve-2021-4034 privilege-escalation exploit polkit pkexec pwnkit red-team linux

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="ly4k/PwnKit")