CVE-2026-42541
MediumCVSS 4.3Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk6th percentile - higher than 6% of all known CVEs
Summary
Kubewarden, a policy engine for Kubernetes, has a policy-level authorization gap. An attacker with privileged AdmissionPolicy or AdmissionPolicyGroup create permissions can use the can_i host callback to issue SubjectAccessReview requests and enumerate RBAC permissions of any user or service account across the cluster, even without a context-aware resource grant.
Risk Assessment
This can lead to information disclosure and reconnaissance, facilitating further attacks within the cluster.
Recommendation
Update Kubewarden to a version containing the fix for this vulnerability (version not specified in the description).
Other vulnerabilities in Kubewarden
Original NVD description (English source)
Kubewarden is a policy engine for Kubernetes. Prior to , An attacker with privileged AdmissionPolicy or AdmissionPolicyGroup create permissions (which isn't the default) can craft a policy that makes use of the can_i host callback. The callback issues a SubjectAccessReview (SAR) requests to enumerate RBAC permissions of any user or service account across the cluster. can_i does not perform that check to enforce the context-aware allow-list and forwards the request directly to the callback handler, which executes a real SubjectAccessReview using policy-server privileges. This creates a policy-level authorization gap: can_i is effectively usable even when the policy has no context-aware resource grant. This is an information disclosure / reconnaissance issue, and not direct workload data exfiltration. The attacker learns permission information, such as whether specific service accounts can "get secrets", "create pods", or "bind clusterroles" in chosen namespaces. This vulnerability is fixed in .
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS

