CVE-2026-42876: medium-severity vulnerability in external-secrets
External Secrets Operator: Privilege escalation with secret overwriting
Published · Updated
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13Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 4.9epss 0.2%
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-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-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%