CVE-2026-72648CWE-526

CVE-2026-72648

Medium · published August 14, 2026

CVSS v3.1
6.5
EPSS
0%
Percentile
20.3
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in an Environment Variable (CWE-526) in Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) can lead to information disclosure via Retrieve Embedded Sensitive Data (CAPEC-37). When ECK reconciles a Fleet Server resource that authenticates to Elasticsearch with a service account token, the token is written into the generated workload specification in cleartext rather than being referenced from the Kubernetes Secret that ECK maintains for the other credentials on the same path. Any principal able to read workload specifications in the affected namespace can therefore read a live Elasticsearch credential, even when Kubernetes RBAC does not grant that principal access to Secrets.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
6.5 · MEDIUM
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00281 · 20.3th percentile
Weakness
CWE-526 · Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in an Environment Variable
Published
2026-08-14T00:17Z
Affected products (1)
ProductVersionsFixed in
elastic/elastic_cloud_on_kubernetes≥ 3.0.0, < 3.5.03.5.0
References (1)
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 13 AUG 19:13Z
    Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in an Environment Variable in Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes Leading to Information Disclosure
    cvelistv5