Kanister has a potential risk which can be leveraged to make a cluster-level privilege escalation

published 2024-08-20 2 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also GHSA-h27c-6xm3-mcqp , GO-2024-3080 , EUVD-2024-2588

cvss: 8.8; version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev: Not listed; not in CISA's catalog
epss: 0.5%; EPSS 0.5% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 44%
public exploits: 0; none known

Kanister is a data protection workflow management tool. The kanister has a deployment called default-kanister-operator, which is bound with a ClusterRole called edit via ClusterRoleBinding. The "edit" ClusterRole is one of Kubernetes default-created ClusterRole, and it has the create/patch/udpate verbs of daemonset resources, create verb of serviceaccount/token resources, and impersonate verb of serviceaccounts resources. A malicious user can leverage access the worker node which has this component to make a cluster-level privilege escalation.

CISA SSVC

Exploitation: none
Automatable: no
Technical impact: total
Assessed: 2 y ago (2024-08-21)

Exploit prediction

0.52% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 44% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by	version	score	vector
CNA	3.1	8.8	CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem	package	affected	fixed in
go	github.com/kanisterio/kanister	all versions	no fix listed

Affected products

kanisterio kanister

Classification

Weakness

CWE-269 Improper Privilege Management

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.

Summary