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Fencer Intel
medium 4.9

CVE-2026-42876 json

External Secrets Operator: Privilege escalation with secret overwriting

published 6mo ago modified last mo. also EUVD-2026-29191 , GHSA-fq7h-9x26-6j22 , GO-2026-5377

cvss
4.9
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.2%
EPSS 0.2% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 11%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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.

Patch / fix

  • go github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/apis 2.4.1
  • external-secrets external_secrets_operator 2.4.1
  • govulncheck-vulndb openSUSE Leap 16.0 0.0.20260723T184607-160000.1.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2026:21483-1

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Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2026-42876 updated cvss 8.1

external-secrets-operator: External Secrets Operator: Privilege escalation via ExternalSecret resource creation

  • Red Hat All currently supported Red Hat products
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
5mo ago

Exploit prediction

0.22% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 11% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 4.9 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N
GitHub 3.1 4.9 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:L/A:N

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
go github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/apis
>=0.1.0, <2.4.1
all versions
2.4.1

Affected products

  • external-secrets external-secrets

Classification

Weakness

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.

CPEs and fixed versions use Anchore's correction of NVD's data: Added CPE configurations because not yet analyzed by NVD.