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Medium · 6.8 CVE-2026-39961 GHSA-99j8-wv67-4c72GO-2026-5283

Aiven Operator has cross-namespace secret exfiltration via ClickhouseUser connInfoSecretSource

Published Apr 9, 2026 · Updated Apr 10, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

Description

Aiven Operator allows you to provision and manage Aiven Services from your Kubernetes cluster. From 0.31.0 to before 0.37.0, a developer with create permission on ClickhouseUser CRDs in their own namespace can exfiltrate secrets from any other namespace — production database credentials, API keys, service tokens — with a single kubectl apply. The operator reads the victim's secret using its ClusterRole and writes the password into a new secret in the attacker's namespace. The operator acts as a confused deputy: its ServiceAccount has cluster-wide secret read/write (aiven-operator-role ClusterRole), and it trusts user-supplied namespace values in spec.connInfoSecretSource.namespace without validation. No admission webhook enforces this boundary — the ServiceUser webhook returns nil, and no ClickhouseUser webhook exists. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.37.0.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
aiven aiven-operator < 0.37.0 —

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

Affected packages

EcosystemPackageAffectedFixedRecord
Go github.com/aiven/aiven-operator >= 0.31.0, < 0.37.0 0.37.0 GHSA-99j8-wv67-4c72

Advisories 1

References