What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-26287: External Secrets Operator: label enforcement bypass in webhook generator enables secret exfiltration

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.1 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: none known
• Published: 2026-10-06 · updated 2026-10-06
• Weakness: CWE-696

Description

External Secrets Operator reads information from a third-party service and automatically injects the values as Kubernetes Secrets. Starting in version 0.10.0 and prior to version 1.3.2, a bug in the `webhook` generator initialization order incorrectly cleared the label-enforcement flag (`EnforceLabels`) after it was set, resulting in the provider-side check for `external-secrets.io/type=webhook` being skipped (and the operation to succeed while it should have failed with `secret does not contain needed label 'external-secrets.io/type: webhook'. Update secret label to use it with webhook`. Version 1.3.2 contains a patch.

Affected products

• external-secrets: from 0.10.0, < 1.3.2

References

• https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/commit/25aa09275861e3ed6fc5d2a1a60b9ac3df4a93ba
• https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/pull/5901
• https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/releases/tag/v1.3.2
• https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/security/advisories/GHSA-q7hv-xx6h-q2x8

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