CVE-2026-40923: Tekton Pipelines: VolumeMount path restriction bypass via missing filepath.Clean in /tekton/ check

Summary

A validation bypass in the VolumeMount path restriction allows mounting volumes under restricted /tekton/ internal paths by using .. path traversal components. The restriction check uses strings.HasPrefix without filepath.Clean, so a path like /tekton/home/../results passes validation but resolves to /tekton/results at runtime.

Details

Tekton Pipelines restricts VolumeMount paths under /tekton/ (except /tekton/home) to prevent users from interfering with internal execution state. The validation at pkg/apis/pipeline/v1/containervalidation.go checks mount paths using strings.HasPrefix without normalizing the path first:

go if strings.HasPrefix(vm.MountPath, "/tekton/") && !strings.HasPrefix(vm.MountPath, "/tekton/home") { // reject }

Because /tekton/home is an allowed prefix, a path like /tekton/home/../results passes both checks. At runtime, the container runtime resolves .. and the actual mount point becomes /tekton/results.

The same pattern exists in pkg/apis/pipeline/v1beta1/taskvalidation.go.

Impact

An authenticated user with Task or TaskRun creation permissions can mount volumes over internal Tekton paths, potentially:

- Writing fake task results that downstream pipelines trust - Reading or modifying step scripts before execution - Interfering with entrypoint coordination state

Patches

A patch is available at v1.11.1.

Workarounds

- Use admission controllers (OPA/Gatekeeper, Kyverno) to validate that VolumeMount paths do not contain .. components. - In multi-tenant setups, restrict who can create Task and TaskRun resources via RBAC.

Affected Versions

All versions through v1.11.0 (both v1 and v1beta1 APIs).

Acknowledgments

This vulnerability was reported by @kodareef5.