pkexec

About pkexec

From Debian's package description

polkit is an application-level toolkit for defining and handling the policy that allows unprivileged processes to speak to privileged processes. It was previously named PolicyKit.

pkexec is a setuid program to allow certain users to run commands as root or as a different user, similar to sudo. Unlike sudo, it carries out authentication and authorization by sending a request to polkit, so it uses desktop environments' familiar prompting mechanisms for authentication and uses polkit policies for authorization decisions.

By default, members of the 'sudo' Unix group can use pkexec to run any command after authenticating. The authorization rules can be changed by the local system administrator.

If this functionality is not required, removing the pkexec package will reduce security risk by removing a setuid program.

From Debian's description of the pkexec package, under that package's license.