CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-39961

MediumCVSS 6.8
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.40%

34th percentile - higher than 34% of all known CVEs

Summary

Aiven Operator from 0.31.0 to before 0.37.0 allows a developer with create permission on ClickhouseUser CRDs in their own namespace to exfiltrate secrets from any other namespace (production database credentials, API keys, service tokens) with a single kubectl apply. The operator reads the victim's secret using its ClusterRole and writes the password into a new secret in the attacker's namespace, acting as a confused deputy without validating spec.connInfoSecretSource.namespace.

Risk Assessment

A significant leak of credentials and secrets from other namespaces, including production databases and service tokens, is possible by a relatively low-privileged user.

Recommendation

Update Aiven Operator to version 0.37.0 or later. Restrict permissions to create ClickhouseUser CRDs and deploy admission policies (e.g., namespace-validating webhooks) to prevent abuse.

Related vulnerabilities

Original NVD description (English source)

Aiven Operator allows you to provision and manage Aiven Services from your Kubernetes cluster. From 0.31.0 to before 0.37.0, a developer with create permission on ClickhouseUser CRDs in their own namespace can exfiltrate secrets from any other namespace — production database credentials, API keys, service tokens — with a single kubectl apply. The operator reads the victim's secret using its ClusterRole and writes the password into a new secret in the attacker's namespace. The operator acts as a confused deputy: its ServiceAccount has cluster-wide secret read/write (aiven-operator-role ClusterRole), and it trusts user-supplied namespace values in spec.connInfoSecretSource.namespace without validation. No admission webhook enforces this boundary — the ServiceUser webhook returns nil, and no ClickhouseUser webhook exists. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.37.0.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS