Contrast before 1.4.1 Coordinator Impersonation via Unauthenticated Recovery

Contrast is a confidential-computing runtime for Kubernetes. In versions before 1.4.1, a recovering Coordinator does not verify the seed supplied by the recovering party. An attacker can therefore stand up a rogue Coordinator whose manifest passes validation but whose secret seed is attacker-controlled. If network traffic is redirected from the legitimate Coordinator to the attacker's Coordinator, a workload owner can be impersonated when they either set a new manifest without comparing the returned root CA certificate against the existing one (the default behavior of the contrast CLI) or verify the Coordinator without comparing the root CA certificate against a trusted reference. Under these conditions the attacker can issue certificates that chain back to the rogue Coordinator's root CA and recover arbitrary workload secrets of workloads deployed after the attack. Secrets of the legitimate Coordinator (seed, workload secrets, CA), workload integrity, and certificates chaining to the mesh CA are not affected.

Source published

27 Sep 2026 01:28:27 UTC

Source modified

8 Oct 2026 15:21:39 UTC

Observed here

23 Oct 2026 15:48:27 UTC

Source terms

CVE Program Terms of Use

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CVSS 4.0 · 7.1 CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:P/VC:L/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

CVSS 3.1 · 7.1 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:L/I:H/A:N