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GHSA-qwgc-rr35-h4x9: External Secrets Operator vulnerable to privilege escalation

Details

The external-secrets has a deployment called default-external-secrets-cert-controller, which is bound with a same-name ClusterRole. This ClusterRole has “get/list” verbs of secrets resources(https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/blob/main/deploy/charts/external-secrets/templates/cert-controller-rbac.yaml#L49). It also has path/update verb of validatingwebhookconfigurations resources(https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/blob/main/deploy/charts/external-secrets/templates/cert-controller-rbac.yaml#L27). As a result, if a malicious user can access the worker node which has this deployment. he/she can:

  1. For the “get/list secrets” permission, he/she can abuse the SA token of this deployment to retrieve or get ALL secrets in the whole cluster, including the cluster-admin secret if created. After that, he/she can abuse the cluster-admin secret to do whatever he/she likes to the whole cluster, resulting in a cluster-level privilege escalation.

  2. For the patch/update verb of validatingwebhookconfigurations, the malicious user can abuse these permissions to get sensitive data or lanuch DoS attacks:

For the privilege escalation attack, by updating/patching a Webhook to make it listen to Secret update operations, the attacker can capture and log all data from requests attempting to update Secrets. More specifically, when a Secret is updated, this Webhook sends the request data to the logging-service, which can then log the content of the Secret. This way, an attacker could indirectly gain access to the full contents of the Secret.

For the DoS attack, by updating/patching a Webhook, and making it deny all Pod create and update requests, the attacker can prevent any new Pods from being created or existing Pods from being updated, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.

PoC

Please see the “Details” section

Impact

Privilege escalation

ghsa
#web#dos#git

Package

gomod github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets (Go)

Affected versions

< 0.10.2

Details

The external-secrets has a deployment called default-external-secrets-cert-controller, which is bound with a same-name ClusterRole. This ClusterRole has “get/list” verbs of secrets resources(https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/blob/main/deploy/charts/external-secrets/templates/cert-controller-rbac.yaml#L49). It also has path/update verb of validatingwebhookconfigurations resources(https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/blob/main/deploy/charts/external-secrets/templates/cert-controller-rbac.yaml#L27). As a result, if a malicious user can access the worker node which has this deployment. he/she can:

  1. For the “get/list secrets” permission, he/she can abuse the SA token of this deployment to retrieve or get ALL secrets in the whole cluster, including the cluster-admin secret if created. After that, he/she can abuse the cluster-admin secret to do whatever he/she likes to the whole cluster, resulting in a cluster-level privilege escalation.

  2. For the patch/update verb of validatingwebhookconfigurations, the malicious user can abuse these permissions to get sensitive data or lanuch DoS attacks:

For the privilege escalation attack, by updating/patching a Webhook to make it listen to Secret update operations, the attacker can capture and log all data from requests attempting to update Secrets. More specifically, when a Secret is updated, this Webhook sends the request data to the logging-service, which can then log the content of the Secret. This way, an attacker could indirectly gain access to the full contents of the Secret.

For the DoS attack, by updating/patching a Webhook, and making it deny all Pod create and update requests, the attacker can prevent any new Pods from being created or existing Pods from being updated, resulting in a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.

PoC

Please see the “Details” section

Impact

Privilege escalation

References

  • GHSA-qwgc-rr35-h4x9
  • https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-45041
  • external-secrets/external-secrets@0368b98
  • external-secrets/external-secrets@428a452
  • https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/blob/main/deploy/charts/external-secrets/templates/cert-controller-rbac.yaml#L27
  • https://github.com/external-secrets/external-secrets/blob/main/deploy/charts/external-secrets/templates/cert-controller-rbac.yaml#L49

Published to the GitHub Advisory Database

Sep 9, 2024

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