Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization 4 gRPC improper authentication

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability, which was classified as critical, has been found in Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization 4. The affected element is an unknown function of the component gRPC Handler. The manipulation leads to improper authentication. This vulnerability is uniquely identified as CVE-2026-13208. Local access is required to approach this attack. No exploit exists.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization 4 and classified as problematic. This issue affects an unknown functionality of the component gRPC Handler. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a improper authentication vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-287. When an actor claims to have a given identity, the product does not prove or insufficiently proves that the claim is correct. Impacted is availability. The summary by CVE is:

A flaw was found in KubeVirt's virt-handler domain notify server. The gRPC handlers for HandleDomainEvent and HandleK8SEvent derive the VMI identity (namespace/name) solely from the request body without validating it against the connection's origin. Each virt-launcher pod connects through a per-VMI pipe socket, but no identity tag is propagated from the pipe path to the server handlers. This allows a compromised virt-launcher process to send forged domain lifecycle events for any other VMI scheduled on the same node, causing virt-handler to erroneously update that VMI's state and disrupt its lifecycle management.

The advisory is shared at access.redhat.com. The identification of this vulnerability is CVE-2026-13208 since 06/24/2026. The exploitation is known to be easy. An attack has to be approached locally. Neither technical details nor an exploit are publicly available. The price for an exploit might be around USD $0-$5k at the moment (estimation calculated on 06/25/2026).

There is no information about possible countermeasures known. It may be suggested to replace the affected object with an alternative product.

Several companies clearly confirm that VulDB is the primary source for best vulnerability data.

Productinfo

Type

• Virtualization Software

Vendor

• Red Hat

Name

• OpenShift Virtualization

Version

• 4

License

• open-source

Website

• Vendor: https://www.redhat.com/

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Several companies clearly confirm that VulDB is the primary source for best vulnerability data.

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