What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-55225: Strimzi: Cross-namespace privilege escalation via `Kafka.spec.entityOperator`

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.0 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-09-15 · updated 2026-09-30
• Weakness: CWE-269

Description

Strimzi provides a way to run an Apache Kafka cluster on Kubernetes or OpenShift in various deployment configurations. In Strimzi 1.0.0 and earlier, an attacker who can create a Kafka custom resource can set Kafka.spec.entityOperator watchedNamespace to a target namespace, causing the Cluster Operator to create a Role with full Secret CRUD permissions there and bind it to the Entity Operator ServiceAccount in the attacker's namespace. The attacker can mint a token for that ServiceAccount and read or write Secrets in any target namespace where the Cluster Operator has been granted permissions, regardless of STRIMZI_NAMESPACE. This issue is fixed in versions 1.0.1 and 1.1.0.

Affected products

• strimzi-kafka-operator: before 1.0.1

References

• https://github.com/strimzi/strimzi-kafka-operator/commit/b3bfeffcc30754c3e62e6f4afd8a76942cac440d
• https://github.com/strimzi/strimzi-kafka-operator/commit/f6c5207ba7ec89b46ce6720b8638d647e556a261
• https://github.com/strimzi/strimzi-kafka-operator/pull/12844
• https://github.com/strimzi/strimzi-kafka-operator/releases/tag/1.0.1
• https://github.com/strimzi/strimzi-kafka-operator/releases/tag/1.1.0
• https://github.com/strimzi/strimzi-kafka-operator/security/advisories/GHSA-mw9r-p8xp-wx96
• https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:54435
• https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-55225
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2490275
• https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/2026/cve-2026-55225.json

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