SOC status:Duty analyst on shift

UK Cyber Defence
VulnerabilityAwaiting Analysis

CVE-2026-44945

A privilege escalation vulnerability exists in Rancher's impersonation middleware (pkg/auth/requests/impersonate.go).

CRITICAL 9.1EPSS 0.56%

Does this matter?

High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (0.56%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit.

Description

A privilege escalation vulnerability exists in Rancher's impersonation middleware (pkg/auth/requests/impersonate.go). An authenticated Rancher user with the default user global role can gain full administrative access to the Rancher control plane and transitively to all downstream clusters it manages. This issue affects Rancher: from 2.11.0 before 2.11.16, from 2.12.0 before 2.12.12, from 2.13.0 before 2.13.8, and from 2.14.0 before 2.14.2.

CVSS 3.1
9.1 CRITICALCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
EPSS
0.56% probability · 46th percentile
Public exploits
None in Exploit-DB
CISA KEV
Not listed
Weakness
CWE-441, CWE-497
Source
meissner@suse.de
EPSS trend
0%3%5%27 October 2026: 0.56%27 October 202627 October 2026

EPSS 0.6% since 27 October 2026; no change recorded yet. Points are recorded when the score first appears and whenever it moves by a percentage point or more.

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA, exploits from Exploit-DB. Refreshed daily. Download this record as JSON.