What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-42876: External Secrets Operator: Privilege escalation with secret overwriting

• Severity: medium (CVSS 4.9 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: 2026-05-11 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-285

Description

External Secrets Operator reads information from a third-party service and automatically injects the values as Kubernetes Secrets. Prior to 2.4.1, a user who only has permission to create ExternalSecret resources can cause the operator to create a Secret that Kubernetes will automatically populate with a long-lived token for the specified service account. This effectively allows the user to impersonate any service account in the namespace without needing direct create permissions on TokenRequest or Secrets of that type. This vulnerability is fixed in 2.4.1.

Affected products

• external-secrets: before 2.4.1

References

• https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/commit/4ddd240af7fe88725d9857b9a0c198073502e288
• https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/releases/tag/v2.4.1
• https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/security/advisories/GHSA-fq7h-9x26-6j22

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