CVE-2026-42876GHSA-FQ7H-9X26-6J22GO-2026-5377
External Secrets Operator: Privilege escalation with secret overwriting
- Published
- Last modified
- Where the record stands: published, rejected by its publisher, or superseded by another id.What do these mean? →
- published
- Whether CISA lists it in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog: proof that attackers are using it.What do these mean? →
- Not listed in CISA KEV
- Fix
- Fixed in 2.4.1
- Whether working attack code is public (Exploit-DB, Metasploit, Nuclei or GitHub). Public code makes attacks easier.What do these mean? →
- None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
CISA's decision points: whether it is exploited, whether attacks can be automated, and how much control an attacker gets. Assessed (SSVC 2.0.3).What do these mean? →
- Exploitation: none
- Automatable: no
- Technical impact: partial
Summary
External Secrets Operator reads information from a third-party service and automatically injects the values as Kubernetes Secrets. Prior to 2.4.1, a user who only has permission to create ExternalSecret resources can cause the operator to create a Secret that Kubernetes will automatically populate with a long-lived token for the specified service account. This effectively allows the user to impersonate any service account in the namespace without needing direct create permissions on TokenRequest or Secrets of that type. This vulnerability is fixed in 2.4.1.
Timeline
- CVE published
- CISA SSVC assessment
Exploitation: none · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial
- Record last updated
Affected versions
- external-secrets external-secrets
fixed in 2.4.1
- github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/apisGo
From 0.1.0 · fixed in 2.4.1
- github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/apisGo
All versions