CVE-2026-75481 in SkyPilot
Summary
by MITRE • 08/18/2026
SkyPilot fails to validate that authenticated users are entitled to grant administrator roles when updating service account permissions. Attackers can create a service account, escalate it to administrator role, and authenticate with its bearer token to gain administrative control over all users and workspaces.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 08/18/2026
The vulnerability described constitutes a critical authorization flaw within the SkyPilot platform, specifically categorized under CWE-269 Improper Control of Interaction with an Administrative Interface. This issue arises from a failure in the application logic responsible for validating user privileges during permission updates for service accounts. In secure systems, administrative actions such as assigning elevated roles must be strictly gated behind robust access control checks that verify whether the initiating requestor possesses sufficient authority to perform the action. However, in this instance, the system fails to enforce these constraints, allowing any authenticated user to bypass intended restrictions and elevate a standard service account to an administrator role. This represents a classic case of broken object level authorization or insecure direct object reference where the context of who is making the change is not properly validated against their actual permissions.
The operational impact of this vulnerability is severe, as it effectively nullifies the principle of least privilege that underpins modern cloud security architectures. By exploiting this flaw, an attacker can create a new service account and immediately promote it to have administrator-level access. Once elevated, the compromised service account possesses full control over all users and workspaces within the environment. This grants the adversary unrestricted ability to read, modify, or delete sensitive data, manage infrastructure configurations, and potentially pivot further into other connected systems using the high-privilege credentials obtained through the bearer token associated with that service account. The existence of a valid bearer token for an administrator-level service account means that any subsequent API calls made by this entity are treated as coming from a trusted superuser, bypassing most standard security monitoring and access controls designed to protect against lower-privileged threats.
From a threat modeling perspective aligned with the MITRE ATT&CK framework, this vulnerability facilitates several malicious techniques including Account Manipulation (T1098) for privilege escalation and potentially Credential Access if the attacker can extract additional secrets associated with the elevated account. The ability to grant administrator roles remotely via API calls also aligns with Remote Service Session Hijacking or Abuse of Cloud Infrastructure mechanisms that allow lateral movement across multi-tenant environments. Because service accounts are often used by automated processes, CI/CD pipelines, and long-running applications, compromising one such account provides a persistent foothold within the infrastructure. The attacker can maintain access even if individual user passwords are rotated, as the service account credentials remain valid until explicitly revoked or expired, which may not happen for extended periods in production environments.
Mitigation strategies must focus on implementing strict role-based access control checks at every step of the permission update workflow. Developers should ensure that any API endpoint responsible for modifying roles verifies that the authenticated user holds a specific administrative privilege before allowing the assignment of higher-level roles to other entities, including service accounts. Additionally, adopting a zero-trust architecture where no entity is trusted by default and all requests are verified against current policy contexts can prevent such escalations. Implementing audit logging with alerts for unusual role assignments, particularly those involving rapid creation followed immediately by elevation, would aid in detection. Regular security assessments focusing on authorization logic flaws and enforcing multi-factor authentication for administrative actions further reduce the risk surface associated with this type of vulnerability.