CVE-2026-10090

9.9 CRITICAL

Published 2026-08-05 · Updated 2026-08-06

AI risk analysis

Summary: The flaw allows a user with namespace-scoped 'edit' privileges to create Subscription resources that can escalate their privileges to full cluster-admin access, bypassing intended security controls.
Exploitability: Exploitation requires an attacker to have namespace-scoped 'edit' privileges and control over a Helm repository. The ease of exploitation depends on the administrative controls in place.
Blast radius: If exploited, this flaw can result in full cluster-admin privilege escalation across all clusters managed by ACM, severely impacting system security and integrity.
Prioritized remediation: Restrict namespace-scoped 'edit' privileges to only users who require them and ensure that subscription creation is limited to the subscription namespace without broader cluster access.

privilege-escalationhelmkubernetesacm

Analysis generated locally by qwen2.5:7b-instruct (no data left the box). AI-assisted — verify against primary sources before acting.

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.

CVSS vector

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

Weaknesses

CWE-267

All references

Source data: NVD (nvd.nist.gov), public domain. Exploit-DB.ai adds local AI analysis for defensive use only.