CVE-2026-23990CWE-269CWE-862

Flux Operator Web UI Impersonation Bypass via Empty OIDC Claims

Medium · published January 21, 2026

CVSS v3.1
5.3
EPSS
0%
Percentile
27.1
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

The Flux Operator is a Kubernetes CRD controller that manages the lifecycle of CNCF Flux CD and the ControlPlane enterprise distribution. Starting in version 0.36.0 and prior to version 0.40.0, a privilege escalation vulnerability exists in the Flux Operator Web UI authentication code that allows an attacker to bypass Kubernetes RBAC impersonation and execute API requests with the operator's service account privileges. In order to be vulnerable, cluster admins must configure the Flux Operator with an OIDC provider that issues tokens lacking the expected claims (e.g., `email`, `groups`), or configure custom CEL expressions that can evaluate to empty values. After OIDC token claims are processed through CEL expressions, there is no validation that the resulting `username` and `groups` values are non-empty. When both values are empty, the Kubernetes client-go library does not add impersonation headers to API requests, causing them to be executed with the flux-operator service account's credentials instead of the authenticated user's limited permissions. This can result in privilege escalation, data exposure, and/or information disclosure. Version 0.40.0 patches the issue.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
5.3 · MEDIUM
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00348 · 27.1th percentile
Weaknesses
CWE-269 · Improper Privilege Management; CWE-862 · Missing Authorization
Published
2026-01-21T22:25Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 21 JAN 22:25Z
    Flux Operator Web UI Impersonation Bypass via Empty OIDC Claims
    cvelistv5