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Critical · 9.0 CVE-2026-10090 EUVD-2026-53294GHSA-g9vp-wj77-5767

Multicluster-operators-subscription: multicluster-operators-subscription: namespace edit user can deploy cluster-scoped clusterrolebinding and become cluster-admin via application subscription

Published Aug 5, 2026 · Updated Sep 8, 2026 · Assigned by redhat

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

VendorProductAffectedFixed
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