CVE-2026-42876CWE-285

External Secrets Operator: Priviledge escalation with secret overwriting

Medium · published May 11, 2026

CVSS v3.1
4.9
EPSS
0%
Percentile
16.4
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

External Secrets Operator reads information from a third-party service and automatically injects the values as Kubernetes Secrets. Prior to 2.4.1, a user who only has permission to create ExternalSecret resources can cause the operator to create a Secret that Kubernetes will automatically populate with a long-lived token for the specified service account. This effectively allows the user to impersonate any service account in the namespace without needing direct create permissions on TokenRequest or Secrets of that type. This vulnerability is fixed in 2.4.1.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
4.9 · MEDIUM
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00257 · 16.4th percentile
Weakness
CWE-285 · Improper Authorization
Published
2026-05-11T18:58Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 11 MAY 18:58Z
    External Secrets Operator: Priviledge escalation with secret overwriting
    cvelistv5