Description
A flaw was found in the Application Subscription controller (multicluster-operators-subscription) of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes (ACM). A user with namespace-scoped "edit" privileges in an ACM hub namespace can create a Channel resource pointing to a Helm repository they control and a Subscription resource referencing it. The app-subscription controller fetches and applies the Helm chart contents with its own elevated authority, without verifying whether the subscription creator holds the "open-cluster-management:subscription-admin" role and without restricting applied resources to the subscription namespace. This allows the attacker to include cluster-scoped resources in the Helm chart, such as a ClusterRoleBinding granting the attacker's ServiceAccount the "cluster-admin" ClusterRole. Successful exploitation results in full cluster-admin privilege escalation. This contradicts the ACM documentation which states that non-subscription-admin users should have resources deployed into the subscription namespace only.
Affected products
| Vendor | Product | Affected | Fixed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red Hat | Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.11 | — | — |
| Red Hat | Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.13 | — | — |
| Red Hat | Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.14 | — | — |
| Red Hat | Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.15 | — | — |
| Red Hat | Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.16 | — | — |
| Red Hat | Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.17 | — | — |
References
- RHSA-2026:60386 vendor-advisory
- RHSA-2026:60387 vendor-advisory
- RHSA-2026:60388 vendor-advisory
- RHSA-2026:60389 vendor-advisory
- RHSA-2026:60390 vendor-advisory
- RHSA-2026:60391 vendor-advisory
- https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-10090 vdb-entry
- RHBZ#2483292 issue-tracking