CVE-2024-45041: high-severity vulnerability in external-secrets
External Secrets Operator vulnerable to privilege escalation
Published
E-mail alert when it lands in KEV, gets a public PoC or its score goes up.
21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 8.3epss 0.6%
External Secrets Operator is a Kubernetes operator that integrates external secret management systems. The external-secrets has a deployment called default-external-secrets-cert-controller, which is bound with a same-name ClusterRole. This ClusterRole has "get/list" verbs of secrets resources. It also has path/update verb of validatingwebhookconfigurations resources. This can be used to abuse the SA token of the deployment to retrieve or get ALL secrets in the whole cluster, capture and log all data from requests attempting to update Secrets, or make a webhook deny all Pod create and update requests. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.10.2.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:L/A:H
Affected products
external-secrets · external-secretsRelated CVEs — external-secrets
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2025-55196HIGHExternal Secrets Operator Missing Namespace Restriction in PushSecret and SecretStore List() Calls Allows Unauthorized Secret AccessEPSS 0.4%CVE-2025-62159HIGHExternal Secrets Operator's BeyondTrust Provider has Insecure Secret RetrievalEPSS 0.3%CVE-2026-34984HIGHExternal Secrets Operator has DNS exfiltration via getHostByName in its v2 template engineEPSS 0.3%CVE-2026-26287HIGHExternal Secrets Operator: label enforcement bypass in webhook generator enables secret exfiltrationEPSS 0.2%CVE-2026-42875MEDIUMExternal Secrets Operator: Namespace Isolation Bypass in CAProvider ConfigMap Resolution for SecretStoreEPSS 0.2%CVE-2026-42876MEDIUMExternal Secrets Operator: Privilege escalation with secret overwritingEPSS 0.2%