What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-76654: Subpath symlinking on Windows nodes permits NTLM coercion

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.8 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: 2026-10-26 · updated 2026-10-27
• Weakness: CWE-59

Description

An NTLM coercion vulnerability exists on Windows nodes when the subPath supplied in a pod's volumeMounts is set to a symbolic link that points to an attacker-controlled network share. When a kubelet resolves symlinks, it does not reject a target that resolves to a UNC path. As a result, the kubelet will transparently attempt to authenticate to the share using NTLM. This allows an attacker to obtain the NetNTLMv2 hash of the account under which the kubelet is running. An attacker could then attempt to crack the hash to retrieve the corresponding password or relay it to impersonate the node, if the node is domain-joined.

Affected products

• Kubernetes: from v1.34.0 through v1.34.11; from v1.35.0 through v1.35.8; from v1.36.0 through v1.36.4; from v1.37.0 through v1.37.0

References

• https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/142098
• https://groups.google.com/g/kubernetes-security-announce/c/Wkv04IFzW8g
• http://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2026/09/23/36

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