What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-76298: Use of Hard-coded Cryptographic Key in the PostgreSQL Sidecar Service in Splunk Enterprise
- Severity: high (CVSS 8.8 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: 2026-10-21 · updated 2026-10-30
- Weakness: CWE-321
Description
In Splunk Enterprise versions below 10.4.4 and 10.2.8, a user who does not hold the "admin" or "power" Splunk roles could derive the PostgreSQL sidecar database superuser password and run arbitrary operating system commands as the user account running Splunk Enterprise on search head cluster members. The vulnerability is possible because the PostgreSQL sidecar service derives a privileged database password from the search head cluster identifier that appears in search job logs. For more information see About configuring role-based user access (https://help.splunk.com/en/splunk-enterprise/administer/manage-users-and-security/10.2/manage-splunk-platform-users-and-roles/about-configuring-role-based-user-access), server.conf (https://help.splunk.com/en/splunk-enterprise/administer/admin-manual/10.2/configuration-file-reference/10.2.0-configuration-file-reference/server.conf), and Sidecar configuration settings (https://help.splunk.com/en/splunk-enterprise/administer/admin-manual/10.4/splunk-sidecars/sidecar-configuration-settings) in the Splunk documentation.
Affected products
- Splunk Enterprise: from 10.2.0 before 10.2.8; from 10.4.0 before 10.4.4 — fixed in 10.2.8, 10.4.4
- Splunk Enterprise: from 10.4 before 10.4.4; from 10.2 before 10.2.8 — fixed in 10.2.8, 10.4.4
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: Splunk Enterprise 10.2.8, 10.4.4; Splunk Enterprise 10.2.8, 10.4.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
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