CyberRota Analysis
AI-GeneratedA critical vulnerability exists in the Application Subscription controller of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, allowing users with namespace-scoped "edit" privileges to exploit the system by creating a Channel resource that points to a malicious Helm repository. This flaw enables attackers to escalate privileges to cluster-admin by applying cluster-scoped resources without proper authorization checks. Organizations using Red Hat ACM should prioritize addressing this vulnerability to prevent potential unauthorized access and control over their Kubernetes clusters.
Public Exploit Signal
A public exploit, PoC, GitHub repository or Metasploit reference was detected for this CVE.
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Original NVD 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.