Portainer: Kubernetes middleware continues after token validation failure, bypassing endpoint authorization

Summary

Portainer Community Edition is a lightweight service delivery platform for containerized applications that can be used to manage Docker, Swarm, Kubernetes and ACI environments. From 2.33.0 to before 2.33., Portainer proxies requests to Kubernetes clusters through a middleware layer (kubeClientMiddleware) that validates the requesting user's token before forwarding traffic to the cluster. When security.RetrieveTokenData returned an error, the middleware wrote an HTTP 403 response but was missing a return statement — execution continued into the handler with a nil tokenData value. The Kubernetes endpoints sit behind Portainer's outer AuthenticatedAccess bouncer, so an attacker requires a valid Portainer session. However, a user whose secondary token validation fails in kubeClientMiddleware — for example a user without permission to access a given Kubernetes endpoint — would have their request forwarded to the cluster anyway, bypassing the authorization check. The same defect was present in both the CE and EE codebases. This vulnerability is fixed in 2.33.8.

Timeline

1. May 28, 2026, 9:01 PM UTCCVE published
2. May 30, 2026, 2:20 AM UTCCISA SSVC assessment

   Exploitation: none · Automatable: no · Technical impact: total

3. May 30, 2026, 2:20 AM UTCRecord last updated

Affected versions

• portainer portainer

  From 2.33.0 · fixed in 2.33.8

• github.com/portainer/portainerGo

  From 2.33.0 · fixed in 2.33.8

• github.com/portainer/portainerGo

  All versions

References 1