aiven aiven-operator up to 0.36.x namespace privileges management

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability, which was classified as critical, has been found in aiven aiven-operator up to 0.36.x. This vulnerability affects unknown code. This manipulation of the argument namespace causes privileges management. This vulnerability appears as CVE-2026-39961. The attack may be initiated remotely. There is no available exploit. It is advisable to upgrade the affected component.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in aiven aiven-operator up to 0.36.x. It has been declared as problematic. Affected by this vulnerability is an unknown functionality. The manipulation of the argument namespace with an unknown input leads to a privileges management vulnerability. The CWE definition for the vulnerability is CWE-269. The product does not properly assign, modify, track, or check privileges for an actor, creating an unintended sphere of control for that actor. As an impact it is known to affect confidentiality. The summary by CVE is:

Aiven Operator allows you to provision and manage Aiven Services from your Kubernetes cluster. From 0.31.0 to before 0.37.0, a developer with create permission on ClickhouseUser CRDs in their own namespace can exfiltrate secrets from any other namespace — production database credentials, API keys, service tokens — with a single kubectl apply. The operator reads the victim's secret using its ClusterRole and writes the password into a new secret in the attacker's namespace. The operator acts as a confused deputy: its ServiceAccount has cluster-wide secret read/write (aiven-operator-role ClusterRole), and it trusts user-supplied namespace values in spec.connInfoSecretSource.namespace without validation. No admission webhook enforces this boundary — the ServiceUser webhook returns nil, and no ClickhouseUser webhook exists. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.37.0.

It is possible to read the advisory at github.com. This vulnerability is known as CVE-2026-39961 since 04/08/2026. The exploitation appears to be easy. The attack can be launched remotely. Additional levels of successful authentication are necessary for exploitation. Technical details of the vulnerability are known, but there is no available exploit. The attack technique deployed by this issue is T1068 according to MITRE ATT&CK.

Upgrading to version 0.37.0 eliminates this vulnerability.

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Productinfo

Vendor

• aiven

Name

• aiven-operator

Version

• 0.1
• 0.2
• 0.3
• 0.4
• 0.5
• 0.6
• 0.7
• 0.8
• 0.9
• 0.10
• 0.11
• 0.12
• 0.13
• 0.14
• 0.15
• 0.16
• 0.17
• 0.18
• 0.19
• 0.20
• 0.21
• 0.22
• 0.23
• 0.24
• 0.25
• 0.26
• 0.27
• 0.28
• 0.29
• 0.30
• 0.31
• 0.32
• 0.33
• 0.34
• 0.35
• 0.36

Website

• Product: https://github.com/aiven/aiven-operator/

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