polkitd

About polkitd

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.

It is a framework for centralizing the decision making process with respect to granting access to privileged operations for unprivileged (desktop) applications.

In a typical use of polkit, an unprivileged application such as gnome-disks sends requests via D-Bus or other inter-process communication mechanisms to a privileged system service such as udisks, which asks polkitd for permission to process those requests. This allows the application to carry out privileged tasks without making use of setuid, which avoids several common sources of security vulnerabilities.

This package provides the polkitd D-Bus service and supporting programs. The pkexec program is not included, and can be found in the pkexec package.

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