External Secrets Operator: Privilege escalation with secret overwriting
Exact source revision recorded 23 Oct 2026 15:48:27 UTC. It does not establish the source's current position. Latest evidence.
cve-program · CVE-2026-42876
PublishedExternal 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.
- Source published
- 11 May 2026 18:58:44 UTC
- Source modified
- 6 Oct 2026 15:30:23 UTC
- Observed here
- 23 Oct 2026 15:48:27 UTC
- Source terms
- CVE Program Terms of Use
Original source record · Cite this exact observation · Complete original publisher JSON
This view projects the publisher's source fields for reading; the original JSON retains additional fields and CVE enrichment containers. Attribution: cve-program · CVE Program Terms of Use. Source text is retained; field grouping and change labels are provided by ChangeIntel.
CVSS 3.1 · 4.9 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N