What is CVE-2026-4897?

CVE-2026-4897 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Freedesktop Polkit, classified under Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling. CVSS score: 5.5/10. Published 2026-03-26.

How severe is CVE-2026-4897?

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

Resource exhaustion in Freedesktop Polkit

CVE-2026-4897

A flaw was found in polkit. A local user can exploit this by providing a specially crafted, excessively long input to the `polkit-agent-helper-1` setuid binary via standard input (stdin). This unbounded input can lead to an out-of-memory (OOM) condition, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) for the system.

EPSS: 0.001 (3.1th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.

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.

Affected products

Freedesktop Polkit
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9
Red Hat Openshift Container Platform 4
Redhat Enterprise_linux — versions 6.0, 7.0, 8.0
Redhat Openshift_container_platform — versions 4.0

Weakness classification (CWE)

CWE-770 — Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

References

secalert@redhat.com (x_refsource_REDHAT, vdb-entry, Vendor Advisory)
secalert@redhat.com (x_refsource_REDHAT, issue-tracking, Issue Tracking, Vendor Advisory)

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-4897?: CVE-2026-4897 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Freedesktop Polkit, classified under Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling. CVSS score: 5.5/10. Published 2026-03-26.
How severe is CVE-2026-4897?: Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.5 out of 10.