What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-2728: Bypassing enforce mountable secrets policy imposed by the ServiceAccount admission plugin

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 2.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2023-07-03 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-20

Description

Users may be able to launch containers that bypass the mountable secrets policy enforced by the ServiceAccount admission plugin when using ephemeral containers. The policy ensures pods running with a service account may only reference secrets specified in the service account’s secrets field. Kubernetes clusters are only affected if the ServiceAccount admission plugin and the `kubernetes.io/enforce-mountable-secrets` annotation are used together with ephemeral containers.

Affected products

• Kubernetes: through 1.24.14; from 1.25.0 through 1.25.10; from 1.26.0 through 1.26.5; from 1.27.0 through 1.27.2

References

• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2023/07/06/3
• https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/118640
• https://groups.google.com/g/kubernetes-security-announce/c/vPWYJ_L84m8
• https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20230803-0004/
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2023/07/06/3
• https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/118640
• https://groups.google.com/g/kubernetes-security-announce/c/vPWYJ_L84m8
• https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20230803-0004/

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