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OpenAdvisories
Medium · 5.3 CVE-2026-23990 EUVD-2026-4140GHSA-4xh5-jcj2-ch8qGO-2026-4351

Flux Operator Web UI Impersonation Bypass via Empty OIDC Claims

Published Jan 21, 2026 · Updated Jan 22, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

Description

The Flux Operator is a Kubernetes CRD controller that manages the lifecycle of CNCF Flux CD and the ControlPlane enterprise distribution. Starting in version 0.36.0 and prior to version 0.40.0, a privilege escalation vulnerability exists in the Flux Operator Web UI authentication code that allows an attacker to bypass Kubernetes RBAC impersonation and execute API requests with the operator's service account privileges. In order to be vulnerable, cluster admins must configure the Flux Operator with an OIDC provider that issues tokens lacking the expected claims (e.g., `email`, `groups`), or configure custom CEL expressions that can evaluate to empty values. After OIDC token claims are processed through CEL expressions, there is no validation that the resulting `username` and `groups` values are non-empty. When both values are empty, the Kubernetes client-go library does not add impersonation headers to API requests, causing them to be executed with the flux-operator service account's credentials instead of the authenticated user's limited permissions. This can result in privilege escalation, data exposure, and/or information disclosure. Version 0.40.0 patches the issue.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
controlplaneio-fluxcd flux-operator >= 0.36.0, < 0.40.0 —

Fixed in Linux distributions

Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
openSUSE Leap 16.0 govulncheck-vulndb 0.0.20260723T184607-160000.1.1 openSUSE-SU-2026:21483-1
openSUSE Leap 15.6 govulncheck-vulndb 0.0.20260205T172317-150000.1.146.1 SUSE-SU-2026:0403-1

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
Go github.com/controlplaneio-fluxcd/flux-operator >= 0.36.0, < 0.40.0 0.40.0 GHSA-4xh5-jcj2-ch8q

Advisories 2

References