CVE-2026-72640
MediumCVSS 6.5Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk16th percentile - higher than 16% of all known CVEs
Summary
The Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) operator reads a list of secret references from an annotation on secrets it manages and accepts the namespace recorded in each reference without validating that the reference is authorized for the resource being reconciled. A user with Kubernetes permissions limited to their own namespace can write that annotation, trigger a reconcile, and cause the operator to use its cluster-wide secret permissions to copy the contents of a secret from any other namespace into a secret the user can read.
Risk Assessment
The vulnerability enables privilege escalation and unauthorized access to secrets in other namespaces, potentially leading to exposure of sensitive data and cluster security compromise.
Recommendation
Update the ECK operator to a patched version and restrict the ability to write annotations to trusted entities.
Original NVD description (English source)
The Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) operator reads a list of secret references from an annotation on secrets it manages, and it accepts the namespace recorded in each reference without validating that the reference is authorized for the resource being reconciled. A user whose Kubernetes permissions are limited to their own namespace can write that annotation, trigger a reconcile, and cause the operator to use its cluster-wide secret permissions to copy the contents of a secret from any other namespace into a secret the user can read.