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Fencer Intel
medium 4.2

CVE-2026-59341 json

Sealed Secrets: decryption oracle via Go template injection in unauthenticated controller endpoints

published 2mo ago modified last mo. also EUVD-2026-78349 , GHSA-qj4p-m373-p2wg

Unreviewed: the maintainers' own advisory

Published by the maintainers on their GitHub repository bitnami/sealed-secrets. GitHub has not reviewed it into the GitHub Advisory Database, so the affected packages and versions are the maintainers' word. Read the full advisory on GitHub.

cvss
4.2
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.4%
EPSS 0.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 34%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

A security vulnerability exists in the Sealed Secrets controller's unauthenticated POST endpoints. By submitting a modified payload containing custom Go template logic in spec.template.data, an attacker with internal network access can abuse the handler as a decryption oracle to recover the full plaintext of any sealed secret.

The POST /v1/verify and /v1/rotate handlers call Unseal() to decrypt target secrets, then render any Go templates found in spec.template.data.* using the decrypted payload as the evaluation context (pkg/apis/sealedsecrets/v1alpha1/sealedsecret_expansion.go). Errors encountered during template execution are directly reflected in the resulting HTTP response status codes.

Missing AEAD label binding: the spec.template.data field is omitted from the AEAD authenticated-data label binding ciphertext to metadata. As a result, an attacker can copy a target's valid metadata and encryptedData verbatim, satisfying AEAD decryption and label validation, while freely replacing spec.template.data with arbitrary template logic.

Side-channel oracle: template execution errors map directly to HTTP response codes. HTTP 200 (OK) indicates template execution succeeded; HTTP 409 (Conflict) indicates template execution failed (e.g. via {{ fail "..." }}).

By injecting conditional statements such as {{ if eq (substr 0 1 .password) "S" }}ok{{ else }}{{ fail "x" }}{{ end }}, an attacker receives an HTTP 200 status when a character guess is correct and an HTTP 409 when it is incorrect. This differential response leaks one character-equality bit per request, allowing full secret extraction over successive queries.

Attack vector & prerequisites: unauthenticated; requires network access to the controller's internal service port (:8080). Although this service is not exposed to the public internet by default, it is accessible to any pod within the Kubernetes cluster or via a kubectl port-forward connection.

Patch / fix

  • Bitnami sealed-secrets 0.40.0

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CISA SSVC

Exploitation
Proof of concept is public
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
last mo.

Exploit prediction

0.40% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 34% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-11).

Exploits and checks

  • github.com https://github.com/bitnami/sealed-secrets/security/advisories/GHSA-qj4p-m373-p2wg referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 4.2 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:H/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N

Affected products

  • Bitnami sealed-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.

The maintainers of bitnami/sealed-secrets published their own advisory on GitHub. Reviewed sources take precedence over it.