CVE-2023-30841: Ironic and ironic-inspector deployed within Baremetal Operator may expose as ConfigMaps

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2023-04-26 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-200

Description

Baremetal Operator (BMO) is a bare metal host provisioning integration for Kubernetes. Prior to version 0.3.0, ironic and ironic-inspector deployed within Baremetal Operator using the included `deploy.sh` store their `.htpasswd` files as ConfigMaps instead of Secrets. This causes the plain-text username and hashed password to be readable by anyone having a cluster-wide read-access to the management cluster, or access to the management cluster's Etcd storage. This issue is patched in baremetal-operator PR#1241, and is included in BMO release 0.3.0 onwards. As a workaround, users may modify the kustomizations and redeploy the BMO, or recreate the required ConfigMaps as Secrets per instructions in baremetal-operator PR#1241.

Affected products

metal3-io baremetal-operator: before 0.3.0 — fixed in 0.3.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: metal3-io baremetal-operator 0.3.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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