CVE-2026-77524

KEDA: Privilege escalation from namespace admin to cluster admin via KEDA TriggerAuthentication

State
Published
Severity
9.9 Critical
Published
Oct 14, 2026
Updated
Oct 20, 2026
Reserved
Aug 20, 2026

Read the record on cve.org

Description

KEDA is a Kubernetes-based Event Driven Autoscaling component. In version 2.20.2 and earlier, a namespace administrator who can create TriggerAuthentication and ScaledObject resources can set hashiCorpVault.address to a tenant-controlled endpoint and select Kubernetes authentication without an explicit credential. KEDA then uses the operator pod's projected ServiceAccount token and sends it to that endpoint as a Vault login credential. The JWT-shape filter from the prior CVE-2025-68476 remediation accepts the operator token because its subject is a Kubernetes ServiceAccount, so the attacker can obtain the operator's cluster-wide permissions, including broad Secret reads and workload or admission-related operations. This vulnerability is fixed in 2.21.0.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.19.9 CriticalCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:HGitHub_M

Weaknesses

  • CWE-269 Improper Privilege Management
  • CWE-918 Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)

Affected Products

ProductVersions
kedakedacore
  • < 2.21.0Affected

References

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