What is CVE-2021-4115?

CVE-2021-4115 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Oracle Zfs Storage Appliance Kit, classified under Uncontrolled Resource Consumption. CVSS score: 5.5/10. Published 2022-02-21.

How severe is CVE-2021-4115?

Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.5 out of 10.

Resource exhaustion in Oracle Zfs Storage Appliance Kit

CVE-2021-4115

There is a flaw in polkit which can allow an unprivileged user to cause polkit to crash, due to process file descriptor exhaustion. The highest threat from this vulnerability is to availability. NOTE: Polkit process outage duration is tied to the failing process being reaped and a new one being spawned

Vulnerability class: DoS (Denial of Service)

Published 2022-02-21 · last modified 2026-06-17.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 5.5 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.005 (42.2th percentile), scored 2026-09-29.

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 42nd percentile — 42.2% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.005 · newest: 0.005 · change: -0.000

Affected products

Oracle Zfs Storage Appliance Kit — versions 8.8
Polkit Project — versions 0.117
Canonical Ubuntu Linux — versions 20.04, 21.10
Debian Linux — versions 11.0
Fedoraproject Fedora — versions 34, 35
Red Hat Enterprise Linux — versions 8.0
Polkitd — versions 0.117

Weakness classification (CWE)

CWE-400 — Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

References

access.redhat.com/security/cve/cve-2021-4115 (Third Party Advisory)
gitlab.freedesktop.org/polkit/polkit/-/issues/141 (Exploit, Patch, Third Party Advisory, Issue Tracking)
gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream/rpms/polkit/-/merge_requests/6/diffs (Patch, Third Party Advisory)
lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce@lists.fedoraproject.org/… (vendor-advisory)
www.oracle.com/security-alerts/cpujul2022.html (Patch, Third Party Advisory)
packetstormsecurity.com/files/172849/polkit-File-Descriptor-Exhaustion.html

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2021-4115?: CVE-2021-4115 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Oracle Zfs Storage Appliance Kit, classified under Uncontrolled Resource Consumption. CVSS score: 5.5/10. Published 2022-02-21.
How severe is CVE-2021-4115?: Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.5 out of 10.