CVE-2026-72648
MediumCVSS 6.5Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk20th percentile - higher than 20% of all known CVEs
Summary
Cleartext storage of sensitive information in an environment variable in Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) can lead to information disclosure. When ECK reconciles a Fleet Server resource that authenticates to Elasticsearch with a service account token, the token is written into the generated workload specification in cleartext rather than being referenced from the Kubernetes Secret that ECK maintains for other credentials. Any principal able to read workload specifications in the affected namespace can read a live Elasticsearch credential, even when Kubernetes RBAC does not grant that principal access to Secrets.
Risk Assessment
A person with read access to workload specifications can obtain active Elasticsearch credentials, potentially leading to unauthorized data access and security breaches.
Recommendation
Update ECK to a patched version and ensure service account tokens are stored in Kubernetes Secrets, not in cleartext environment variables. Conduct an audit of access to workload specifications.
Other vulnerabilities in Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes
See all- CVE-2026-78609Medium
Incorrect Authorization in Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) can lead to unauthorized data modification via Metadata Spoofing. An actor with limited Kubernetes permissions in a single namespace could cause attacker-controlled certificate material to be included in the Elasticsearch client trust bundle managed by ECK in a separate namespace.
- CVE-2026-78600Low
Incomplete Cleanup (CWE-459) in Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) can lead to unauthorized access via Privilege Abuse (CAPEC-122). Authentication credentials persist after a cross-namespace association has been denied by RBAC enforcement, allowing a low-privileged tenant to retain unauthorized read access to the associated Elasticsearch cluster.
Original NVD description (English source)
Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in an Environment Variable (CWE-526) in Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) can lead to information disclosure via Retrieve Embedded Sensitive Data (CAPEC-37). When ECK reconciles a Fleet Server resource that authenticates to Elasticsearch with a service account token, the token is written into the generated workload specification in cleartext rather than being referenced from the Kubernetes Secret that ECK maintains for the other credentials on the same path. Any principal able to read workload specifications in the affected namespace can therefore read a live Elasticsearch credential, even when Kubernetes RBAC does not grant that principal access to Secrets.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS