Polkit

polkit

GNOME-based front-end, as seen in Ubuntu.
Developer(s)	David Zeuthen, Red Hat
Written in	C
Operating system	Unix-like
Type	Privilege authorization
License	LGPL (free software)
Website	www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/polkit

KDE-based front-end.

Polkit (formerly PolicyKit) is a component for controlling system-wide privileges in Unix-like operating systems. It provides an organized way for non-privileged processes to communicate with privileged ones. Polkit allows a level of control of centralized system policy. It is developed and maintained by David Zeuthen from Red Hat and hosted by the freedesktop.org project. It is published as free software under the terms of version 2 of the GNU Library General Public License.

Since version 0.105, the name of the project was changed from PolicyKit to polkit to emphasize that the system component was rewritten and that the API was changed, breaking backward compatibility.

Fedora was the first distribution to include PolicyKit, and it has since been used in other distributions including Ubuntu since version 8.04 and openSUSE since version 10.3. Some distributions, like Fedora, have already switched to the rewritten polkit.

It is also possible to use polkit to execute commands with elevated privileges using the command pkexec followed by the command intended to be executed (with root permission). However, it may be preferable to use sudo, as this command provides more flexibility and security, in addition to being easier to configure.

polkit is included by default in some Linux distributions, but not all

See also

• Pluggable authentication module
• Principle of least privilege
• PackageKit

External links

• polkit Home at freedesktop.org
• Documentation at freedesktop.org
• Why polkit explaining polkit's role in a modern system