Aiven Operator has cross-namespace secret exfiltration via ClickhouseUser connInfoSecretSource

Aiven Operator allows you to provision and manage Aiven Services from your Kubernetes cluster. From 0.31.0 to before 0.37.0, a developer with create permission on ClickhouseUser CRDs in their own namespace can exfiltrate secrets from any other namespace — production database credentials, API keys, service tokens — with a single kubectl apply. The operator reads the victim's secret using its ClusterRole and writes the password into a new secret in the attacker's namespace. The operator acts as a confused deputy: its ServiceAccount has cluster-wide secret read/write (aiven-operator-role ClusterRole), and it trusts user-supplied namespace values in spec.connInfoSecretSource.namespace without validation. No admission webhook enforces this boundary — the ServiceUser webhook returns nil, and no ClickhouseUser webhook exists. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.37.0.

Source published

9 Apr 2026 17:14:07 UTC

Source modified

10 Apr 2026 14:08:22 UTC

Observed here

23 Oct 2026 15:48:27 UTC

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CVSS 3.1 · 6.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N