CVE-2026-77968
HighCVSS 8.2Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk16th percentile - higher than 16% of all known CVEs
Summary
In hawtio-operator, the ClusterRole grants secrets: [create, get, list, update, watch] across all namespaces. Although the operator uses a label-selector cache as a memory optimization, the ServiceAccount token authorizes read access to every Secret in the cluster. The operator also bypasses the cache via direct API calls. Compromise of the operator pod would yield read access to every Secret in the cluster, including bootstrap tokens, cloud credentials, and other operators' secrets.
Risk Assessment
Risk of full disclosure of cluster secrets after compromise of the operator pod, potentially leading to cluster takeover and access to cloud credentials.
Recommendation
Recommend restricting ClusterRole permissions to the minimum required, e.g., only read access to secrets in specific namespaces, and avoiding direct API calls that bypass the cache.
Other vulnerabilities in hawtio-operator
See all- CVE-2026-78234Critical
A flaw was found in hawtio-operator. The operator reads the OpenShift Service CA private signing key from the openshift-service-ca namespace and uses it to mint client certificates with a Subject Common Name (CN) supplied by the author of a namespaced Hawtio custom resource. Because the operator ships a ClusterRole that aggregates Hawtio CR permissions into the edit and admin roles, any user with edit access in any namespace can obtain a Service-CA-signed certificate with an arbitrary subject. This certificate can be used to impersonate any in-cluster service identity to peers that trust the Service CA for client authentication, including Jolokia agents and other Service-CA-trusting components.
- CVE-2026-81320Medium
A flaw was found in hawtio-operator: when a custom Route TLS secret is configured and the operator runs at debug log level 1 or higher, the entire Route object — including the TLS private key in PEM format — is serialized to JSON and written to the operator's standard output. Operator logs are typically forwarded to centralized logging systems and readable by anyone with pods/log access in the openshift-operators namespace. Debug level 1 is a low threshold commonly enabled during troubleshooting.
- CVE-2026-81303Medium
A flaw was found in hawtio-operator: the operator holds routes/custom-host:create permission cluster-wide and writes the tenant-supplied spec.routeHostName value from the Hawtio custom resource directly into the Route spec without validation or authorization checks. A namespace edit user, who normally cannot set custom Route hostnames, can use the operator as a confused deputy to claim arbitrary externally-routable hostnames, enabling subdomain takeover and, in combination with the auto-grant OAuthClient, OAuth redirect hijack.
Original NVD description (English source)
A flaw was found in hawtio-operator. The operator's ClusterRole grants secrets: [create, get, list, update, watch] across all namespaces. While the operator uses a controller-runtime label-selector cache as a memory optimization, the ServiceAccount token authorizes read access to every Secret in the cluster. The operator also bypasses the cache via direct API calls. Compromise of the operator pod would yield read access to every Secret in the cluster, including bootstrap tokens, cloud credentials, and other operators' secrets.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS