What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2024-45041: External Secrets Operator vulnerable to privilege escalation

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2024-09-09 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-269

Description

External Secrets Operator is a Kubernetes operator that integrates external secret management systems. The external-secrets has a deployment called default-external-secrets-cert-controller, which is bound with a same-name ClusterRole. This ClusterRole has "get/list" verbs of secrets resources. It also has path/update verb of validatingwebhookconfigurations resources. This can be used to abuse the SA token of the deployment to retrieve or get ALL secrets in the whole cluster, capture and log all data from requests attempting to update Secrets, or make a webhook deny all Pod create and update requests. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.10.2.

Affected products

• external-secrets: before 0.10.2 — fixed in 0.10.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: external-secrets 0.10.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/commit/428a452fd2ad45935312f2c2c0d40bc37ce6e67c
• https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/security/advisories/GHSA-qwgc-rr35-h4x9

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