CVE-2025-71426: Contrast before 1.4.1 Coordinator Impersonation via Unauthenticated Recovery

Severity: high (CVSS 7.1 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2026-09-27 · updated 2026-10-14
Weakness: CWE-285

Description

Contrast is a confidential-computing runtime for Kubernetes. In versions before 1.4.1, a recovering Coordinator does not verify the seed supplied by the recovering party. An attacker can therefore stand up a rogue Coordinator whose manifest passes validation but whose secret seed is attacker-controlled. If network traffic is redirected from the legitimate Coordinator to the attacker's Coordinator, a workload owner can be impersonated when they either set a new manifest without comparing the returned root CA certificate against the existing one (the default behavior of the contrast CLI) or verify the Coordinator without comparing the root CA certificate against a trusted reference. Under these conditions the attacker can issue certificates that chain back to the rogue Coordinator's root CA and recover arbitrary workload secrets of workloads deployed after the attack. Secrets of the legitimate Coordinator (seed, workload secrets, CA), workload integrity, and certificates chaining to the mesh CA are not affected.

Affected products

edgelesssys contrast: before 1.4.1 — fixed in 1.4.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: edgelesssys contrast 1.4.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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