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OpenAdvisories
High · 7.1 CVE-2026-34984 EUVD-2026-22190GHSA-r2pg-r6h7-crf3GO-2026-5602

External Secrets Operator has DNS exfiltration via getHostByName in its v2 template engine

Published Apr 14, 2026 · Updated Apr 14, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

Description

External Secrets Operator reads information from a third-party service and automatically injects the values as Kubernetes Secrets. Versions 2.2.0 and below contain a vulnerability in runtime/template/v2/template.go where the v2 template engine removes env and expandenv from Sprig's TxtFuncMap() but leaves the getHostByName function accessible to user-controlled templates. Since ESO executes templates within the controller process, an attacker who can create or update templated ExternalSecret resources can invoke controller-side DNS lookups using secret-derived values. This creates a DNS exfiltration primitive, allowing fetched secret material to be leaked via DNS queries without requiring direct outbound network access from the attacker's workload. The impact is a confidentiality issue, particularly in environments where untrusted or lower-trust users can author templated ExternalSecret resources and the controller has DNS resolution capability. This issue has been fixed in version 2.3.0.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
external-secrets external-secrets < 2.3.0 —

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

Wolfi

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
Wolfi rolling external-secrets-operator-1.1 No fix yet —

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
Go github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets < 1.3.3-0.20260331202714-6800989bdc12 1.3.3-0.20260331202714-6800989bdc12 GHSA-r2pg-r6h7-crf3
Go github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets >= 2.0.0, <= 2.2.0 — GHSA-r2pg-r6h7-crf3

Advisories 1

References