CVE-2021-41254CWE-78

Privilege escalation to cluster admin on multi-tenant environments

High · published November 12, 2021

CVSS v3.1
8.8
EPSS
2%
Percentile
78.6
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

kustomize-controller is a Kubernetes operator, specialized in running continuous delivery pipelines for infrastructure and workloads defined with Kubernetes manifests and assembled with Kustomize. Users that can create Kubernetes Secrets, Service Accounts and Flux Kustomization objects, could execute commands inside the kustomize-controller container by embedding a shell script in a Kubernetes Secret. This can be used to run `kubectl` commands under the Service Account of kustomize-controller, thus allowing an authenticated Kubernetes user to gain cluster admin privileges. In affected versions multitenant environments where non-admin users have permissions to create Flux Kustomization objects are affected by this issue. This vulnerability was fixed in kustomize-controller v0.15.0 (included in flux2 v0.18.0) released on 2021-10-08. Starting with v0.15, the kustomize-controller no longer executes shell commands on the container OS and the `kubectl` binary has been removed from the container image. To prevent the creation of Kubernetes Service Accounts with `secrets` in namespaces owned by tenants, a Kubernetes validation webhook such as Gatekeeper OPA or Kyverno can be used.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
8.8 · HIGH
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.01824 · 78.6th percentile
Weakness
CWE-78 · Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command ('OS Command Injection')
Published
2021-11-12T17:45Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 12 NOV 17:45Z
    Privilege escalation to cluster admin on multi-tenant environments
    cvelistv5