Privilege escalation to cluster-admin on the Rancher local cluster through Fleet's agent management controller
Written by anthropic/claude-haiku-5.5 from the sources below. Verify against them.
- Exploited
- No known exploitation
- Fix
- Fixed in 0.16.3, 0.15.8, 0.14.12, 0.13.17
- Who is exposed
- Specific setups only
Do first: Check whether your setup matches what the bug needs. Fleet is enabled by default in Rancher. Ordinary users can self-service create Fleet workspaces, which is intentional, documented behavior. Affected Fleet versions are 0.16.0 to before 0.16.3, 0.15.0 to before 0.15.8, 0.14.0 to before 0.14.12, and 0.13.0 to before 0.13.17.
- 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- Where the record stands: published, rejected by its publisher, or superseded by another id.What do these mean?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
- A 0-100 score for how much a CVE matters across the industry: exploitation, exposure, how widely the software is used, severity and whether a fix exists.What do these mean? →
- 28/100 · provisional
- How many real-world setups can hit the bug, from the vendor's advisory and CISA data. It does not know your setup.What do these mean? →
- Specific setups only
- Fix
- Fixed in 0.16.3, 0.15.8, 0.14.12, 0.13.17
- 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
- Exploitation: none
- Automatable: no
- Technical impact: total
Summary
SUSE Rancher Fleet, the GitOps component used to manage clusters, is affected, and the flaw allows an ordinary user to gain cluster-admin privileges on the Rancher management (local) cluster. An attacker could use this to run their own workloads there with full administrative control over the management cluster.
Read the original description
SUSE Rancher Fleet clusters reference a kubeconfig secret that the controller uses to install and manage a Fleet agent on the target cluster. The controller did not sufficiently restrict which kubeconfig secrets a Fleet Cluster object was allowed to reference. As a result, a Fleet cluster defined in a namespace an ordinary user controls could be associated with administrative credentials for the management cluster itself, causing the controller to manage the management cluster on that user's behalf and to run that user's Fleet content there with elevated privileges. This affects SUSE Rancher Fleet 0.16.0 up to 0.16.3, 0.15.0 up to 0.15.8, 0.14.0 up to 0.14.12, 0.13.0 up to 0.13.17 and possible older versions.
What to do
Check whether your setup matches what the bug needs.
Fleet is enabled by default in Rancher. Ordinary users can self-service create Fleet workspaces, which is intentional, documented behavior. Affected Fleet versions are 0.16.0 to before 0.16.3, 0.15.0 to before 0.15.8, 0.14.0 to before 0.14.12, and 0.13.0 to before 0.13.17.Upgrade to a fixed version: 0.16.3, 0.15.8, 0.14.12, 0.13.17.
Workaround: Remove Fleet workspace self-service from ordinary users by not granting the create verb on management.cattle.io fleetworkspaces by default, and restrict who may create Fleet cluster objects.
Timeline
- CVE published
- First seen by cve.now
- Posted on X by cve.now
- CISA SSVC assessment
Exploitation: none · Automatable: no · Technical impact: total
- Record last updated
Affected versions
- Fleet
From 0.16.0 · fixed in 0.16.3; From 0.15.0 · fixed in 0.15.8; From 0.14.0 · fixed in 0.14.12; From 0.13.0 · fixed in 0.13.17
Evidence 1
- Advisory
Corrections
None so far.
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Questions about CVE-2026-94290
What does this mean?
An authenticated user of Rancher's Fleet component could gain full cluster-admin rights on the Rancher management cluster. That would expose its secrets, including downstream cluster credentials and API tokens, let them change RBAC and resources, and disrupt the Rancher management server.Source: github.com
Am I affected, and how do I check?
Fleet versions 0.13.0 up to but not including 0.13.17, 0.14.0 up to 0.14.12, 0.15.0 up to 0.15.8, and 0.16.0 up to 0.16.3 are affected. Check the Fleet version deployed in the Rancher local cluster to see which range applies. The issue concerns ordinary users who can self-service create Fleet workspaces, which is enabled by default in Rancher.Source: github.com
What should I do about it?
Upgrade Fleet to the fixed release for your branch: 0.13.17, 0.14.12, 0.15.8, or 0.16.3. The patched releases are the fix for this issue.Source: github.com
Is it being exploited?
It is not in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, and CISA's SSVC assessment does not mark exploitation as active. That does not mean it has not been attacked: vendors and researchers can report attacks before CISA lists them. No public exploit code is tracked.Source: cve.now feed data