CVE-2026-39961CWE-269CWE-441

Aiven Operator has cross-namespace secret exfiltration via ClickhouseUser connInfoSecretSource

Medium · published April 9, 2026

CVSS v3.1
6.8
EPSS
0%
Percentile
40.7
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

Aiven Operator allows you to provision and manage Aiven Services from your Kubernetes cluster. From 0.31.0 to before 0.37.0, a developer with create permission on ClickhouseUser CRDs in their own namespace can exfiltrate secrets from any other namespace — production database credentials, API keys, service tokens — with a single kubectl apply. The operator reads the victim's secret using its ClusterRole and writes the password into a new secret in the attacker's namespace. The operator acts as a confused deputy: its ServiceAccount has cluster-wide secret read/write (aiven-operator-role ClusterRole), and it trusts user-supplied namespace values in spec.connInfoSecretSource.namespace without validation. No admission webhook enforces this boundary — the ServiceUser webhook returns nil, and no ClickhouseUser webhook exists. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.37.0.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
6.8 · MEDIUM
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00483 · 40.7th percentile
Weaknesses
CWE-269 · Improper Privilege Management; CWE-441 · Unintended Proxy or Intermediary ('Confused Deputy')
Published
2026-04-09T17:14Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 09 APR 17:14Z
    Aiven Operator has cross-namespace secret exfiltration via ClickhouseUser connInfoSecretSource
    cvelistv5