Polkit (formerly PolicyKit) is a component for controlling system-wide privileges in Unix-like operating systems.

It is published as free software under the terms of version 2 of the GNU Lesser General Public License.

[9] However, it may be preferable to use sudo, as this command provides more flexibility and security, in addition to being easier to configure.

[11] A memory corruption vulnerability PwnKit (CVE-2021-4034[12]) discovered in the pkexec command (installed on all major Linux distributions) was announced on January 25, 2022.

The vulnerability received a CVSS score of 7.8 ("High severity") reflecting serious factors involved in a possible exploit: unprivileged users can gain full root privileges, regardless of the underlying machine architecture or whether the polkit daemon is running or not.