What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2024-56513: Karmada PULL Mode Cluster Privilege Escalation

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.7 v4.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2025-01-03 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-266

Description

Karmada is a Kubernetes management system that allows users to run cloud-native applications across multiple Kubernetes clusters and clouds. Prior to version 1.12.0, the PULL mode clusters registered with the `karmadactl register` command have excessive privileges to access control plane resources. By abusing these permissions, an attacker able to authenticate as the karmada-agent to a karmada cluster would be able to obtain administrative privileges over the entire federation system including all registered member clusters. Since Karmada v1.12.0, command `karmadactl register` restricts the access permissions of pull mode member clusters to control plane resources. This way, an attacker able to authenticate as the karmada-agent cannot control other member clusters in Karmada. As a workaround, one may restrict the access permissions of pull mode member clusters to control plane resources according to Karmada Component Permissions Docs.

Affected products

• karmada-io karmada: before 1.12.0

References

• https://github.com/karmada-io/karmada/commit/2c82055c4c7f469411b1ba48c4dba4841df04831
• https://github.com/karmada-io/karmada/pull/5793
• https://github.com/karmada-io/karmada/security/advisories/GHSA-mg7w-c9x2-xh7r
• https://karmada.io/docs/administrator/security/component-permission

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