What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-13888: Openshift-gitops-operator: openshift gitops: namespace admin cluster takeover via privileged jobs

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.1 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2025-12-15 · updated 2026-10-07
• Weakness: CWE-266

Description

A flaw was found in OpenShift GitOps. Namespace admins can create ArgoCD Custom Resources (CRs) that trick the system into granting them elevated permissions in other namespaces, including privileged namespaces. An authenticated attacker can then use these elevated permissions to create privileged workloads that run on master nodes, effectively giving them root access to the entire cluster.

Affected products

• Red Hat OpenShift GitOps 1.16: all versions — fixed in sha256:c41c99f360a2515bce55c42e309e2c72500ba66d3a2c461412dee7de5ea9a9fa
• Red Hat OpenShift GitOps 1.17: all versions — fixed in sha256:27e7a59bb5c5f60be7509e5f4f07f4181d62e6583a943c46f56f568bfc30c2c1
• Red Hat OpenShift GitOps 1.18: all versions — fixed in sha256:3eb6308c58365182b4b5b5aabf35754d821e25b8a04b0595900fb47d52cd3ecc, sha256:43ba408b8ed58259bf338fd29260d936fbde9846f772d0580b3e7486ef8ea300
• redhat-developer gitops-operator: before 1.16.2 — fixed in 1.16.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Red Hat OpenShift GitOps 1.16 sha256:c41c99f360a2515bce55c42e309e2c72500ba66d3a2c461412dee7de5ea9a9fa; Red Hat OpenShift GitOps 1.17 sha256:27e7a59bb5c5f60be7509e5f4f07f4181d62e6583a943c46f56f568bfc30c2c1; Red Hat OpenShift GitOps 1.18 sha256:3eb6308c58365182b4b5b5aabf35754d821e25b8a04b0595900fb47d52cd3ecc, sha256:43ba408b8ed58259bf338fd29260d936fbde9846f772d0580b3e7486ef8ea300; redhat-developer gitops-operator 1.16.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2025:23203
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2025:23206
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2025:23207
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:1017
• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2025-13888
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2418361
• https://github.com/redhat-developer/gitops-operator/commit/bc6ac3e03d7c8b3db5d8f1770c868396a4c2dcef
• https://github.com/redhat-developer/gitops-operator/pull/897
• https://github.com/redhat-developer/gitops-operator/releases/tag/v1.16.2

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