CVE-2026-76654
MediumCVSS 5.8Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk37th percentile - higher than 37% of all known CVEs
Summary
An NTLM coercion vulnerability exists on Windows nodes when the subPath supplied in a pod's volumeMounts is set to a symbolic link that points to an attacker-controlled network share. When a kubelet resolves symlinks, it does not reject a target that resolves to a UNC path. As a result, the kubelet will transparently attempt to authenticate to the share using NTLM. This allows an attacker to obtain the NetNTLMv2 hash of the account under which the kubelet is running. An attacker could then attempt to crack the hash to retrieve the corresponding password or relay it to impersonate the node, if the node is domain-joined.
Risk Assessment
An attacker may capture the kubelet account's NTLM hash and use it to crack the password or impersonate the node within the domain. The risk affects Kubernetes clusters with domain-joined Windows nodes.
Recommendation
Restrict the ability of untrusted users to create pods with volumeMounts subPath and consider disabling NTLM or implementing relay protection. Update Kubernetes to a version that rejects UNC targets.
Other vulnerabilities in Kubernetes
Original NVD description (English source)
An NTLM coercion vulnerability exists on Windows nodes when the subPath supplied in a pod's volumeMounts is set to a symbolic link that points to an attacker-controlled network share. When a kubelet resolves symlinks, it does not reject a target that resolves to a UNC path. As a result, the kubelet will transparently attempt to authenticate to the share using NTLM. This allows an attacker to obtain the NetNTLMv2 hash of the account under which the kubelet is running. An attacker could then attempt to crack the hash to retrieve the corresponding password or relay it to impersonate the node, if the node is domain-joined.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS