What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-72648: Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in an Environment Variable in Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes Leading to Information Disclosure
- Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2026-08-13 · updated 2026-09-04
- Weakness: CWE-526
Description
Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in an Environment Variable (CWE-526) in Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) can lead to information disclosure via Retrieve Embedded Sensitive Data (CAPEC-37). When ECK reconciles a Fleet Server resource that authenticates to Elasticsearch with a service account token, the token is written into the generated workload specification in cleartext rather than being referenced from the Kubernetes Secret that ECK maintains for the other credentials on the same path. Any principal able to read workload specifications in the affected namespace can therefore read a live Elasticsearch credential, even when Kubernetes RBAC does not grant that principal access to Secrets.
Affected products
- Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes: from 3.0.0 before 3.5.0 — fixed in 3.5.0
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes 3.5.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
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