The nasty vulnerability in pkexec
has been rippling through the Linux world,
leading to lots of security
updates to the underlying polkit
authorization toolkit. It also led to a recent discussion on the Fedora
devel mailing list about whether pkexec, which runs a
program as another user, is actually
needed—or
wanted—in some or all of the distribution’s editions. But pkexec
is used by quite a few different Fedora components, particularly in
desktop-oriented editions, and it could perhaps be a better choice than the
alternatives for running programs with the privileges of another user.

Source: LWN.net – [$] Fedora and pkexec