CVE-2026-42876
External Secrets Operator: Priviledge escalation with secret overwriting
Vexday Risk Score
13Low
SSVC decision (CISA)
Track
No exploitation signal → monitor
CVSS 4.9EPSS 0.2%KEV nãoPoC —Nuclei —Metasploit —Patch —
Lifecycle
11 May 2026Published on NVD
Recommendation: Monitor — no exploitation signal at the moment.
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.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N
Affected products
external-secrets · external-secretsWant to know if your infrastructure is exposed to this?
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