Incomplete Cleanup (CWE-459) in Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) can lead to unauthorized access via Privilege Abuse (CAPEC-122). Authentication credentials persist after a cross-namespace association has been denied by RBAC enforcement, allowing a low-privileged tenant to retain unauthorized read access to the associated Elasticsearch cluster.

Incorrect Authorization (CWE-863) in Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) can lead to unauthorized modification of data via Metadata Spoofing (CAPEC-690). An actor holding limited Kubernetes permissions confined to a single namespace could cause attacker-controlled certificate material to be included in the Elasticsearch client trust bundle managed by ECK in a separate namespace.

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.

Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in an Environment Variable (CWE-526) in Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) can lead to information disclosure via Retrieve Embedded Sensitive Data (CAPEC-37). When ECK reconciles a Fleet Server resource that authenticates to Elasticsearch with a service account token, the token is written into the generated workload specification in cleartext rather than being referenced from the Kubernetes Secret that ECK maintains for the other credentials on the same path. Any principal able to read workload specifications in the affected namespace can therefore read a live Elasticsearch credential, even when Kubernetes RBAC does not grant that principal access to Secrets.