CVE-2025-62159: high-severity vulnerability in external-secrets
External Secrets Operator's BeyondTrust Provider has Insecure Secret Retrieval
Published · Updated
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21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 8.7epss 0.3%
External Secrets Operator reads information from a third-party service and automatically injects the values as Kubernetes Secrets. A vulnerability was discovered in the BeyondTrust provider implementation for External Secrets Operator versions 0.10.1 through 0.19.2. The provider previously retrieved Kubernetes secrets directly, without validating the namespace context or the type of secret store. This allowed unauthorized cross-namespace secret access, violating security boundaries and potentially exposing sensitive credentials. In version 0.20.0, the provider code was updated to use the `resolvers.SecretKeyRef` utility, which enforces namespace validation and only allows cross-namespace access for `ClusterSecretStore` types. This ensures secrets are only retrieved from the correct namespace, mitigating the risk of unauthorized access. All users should upgrade to the latest version containing this fix. As a workaround, use a policy engine such as Kyverno or OPA to prevent using BeyondTrust provider and/or validate the `(Cluster)SecretStore` and ensure the namespace may only be set when using a `ClusterSecretStore`.
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:N/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Affected products
external-secrets · external-secretsRelated CVEs — external-secrets
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2024-45041HIGHExternal Secrets Operator vulnerable to privilege escalationEPSS 0.6%CVE-2025-55196HIGHExternal Secrets Operator Missing Namespace Restriction in PushSecret and SecretStore List() Calls Allows Unauthorized Secret AccessEPSS 0.4%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%