CVE-2024-45041: External Secrets Operator vulnerable to privilege escalation

First published: Mon Sep 09 2024(Updated: )

### Details The external-secrets has a deployment called default-external-secrets-cert-controller, which is bound with a same-name ClusterRole. This ClusterRole has "get/list" verbs of secrets resources(https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/blob/main/deploy/charts/external-secrets/templates/cert-controller-rbac.yaml#L49). It also has path/update verb of validatingwebhookconfigurations resources(https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/blob/main/deploy/charts/external-secrets/templates/cert-controller-rbac.yaml#L27). As a result, if a malicious user can access the worker node which has this deployment. he/she can: 1. For the "get/list secrets" permission, he/she can abuse the SA token of this deployment to retrieve or get ALL secrets in the whole cluster, including the cluster-admin secret if created. After that, he/she can abuse the cluster-admin secret to do whatever he/she likes to the whole cluster, resulting in a cluster-level privilege escalation. 2. For the patch/update verb of validatingwebhookconfigurations, the malicious user can abuse these permissions to get sensitive data or lanuch DoS attacks: For the privilege escalation attack, by updating/patching a Webhook to make it listen to Secret update operations, the attacker can capture and log all data from requests attempting to update Secrets. More specifically, when a Secret is updated, this Webhook sends the request data to the logging-service, which can then log the content of the Secret. This way, an attacker could indirectly gain access to the full contents of the Secret. For the DoS attack, by updating/patching a Webhook, and making it deny all Pod create and update requests, the attacker can prevent any new Pods from being created or existing Pods from being updated, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. ### PoC Please see the "Details" section ### Impact Privilege escalation

Credit: security-advisories@github.com security-advisories@github.com

Affected Software	Affected Version	How to fix
go/github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets	<0.10.2	0.10.2
External-secrets External Secrets Operator	<0.10.2

Remedy

https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/commit/428a452fd2ad45935312f2c2c0d40bc37ce6e67c

CVE-2024-45041: External Secrets Operator vulnerable to privilege escalation

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