CVE-2026-78234
Because the operator ships a ClusterRole that aggregates Hawtio CR permissions into the edit and admin roles, any user with edit access in any namespace can obtain a Service-CA-signed certificate with an arbitrary subject.
Does this matter?
High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (0.21%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit.
Description
A flaw was found in hawtio-operator. The operator reads the OpenShift Service CA private signing key from the openshift-service-ca namespace and uses it to mint client certificates with a Subject Common Name (CN) supplied by the author of a namespaced Hawtio custom resource. Because the operator ships a ClusterRole that aggregates Hawtio CR permissions into the edit and admin roles, any user with edit access in any namespace can obtain a Service-CA-signed certificate with an arbitrary subject. This certificate can be used to impersonate any in-cluster service identity to peers that trust the Service CA for client authentication, including Jolokia agents and other Service-CA-trusting components.
- CVSS 3.1
- 9.9 CRITICALCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
- EPSS
- 0.21% probability · 12th percentile
- CISA KEV
- Not listed
- Weakness
- CWE-295
- Source
- secalert@redhat.com
References
Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA. Refreshed daily.