Skip to content
Fencer Vulns
low 3.1

CVE-2026-40109 json

Flux notification-controller GCR Receiver missing email validation allows unauthorized reconciliation triggering

published 2026-04-09 7 mo ago modified 2026-10-26 13 d ago also GHSA-h9cx-xjg6-5v2w , GO-2026-5419 , EUVD-2026-21150

cvss
3.1
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.1%
EPSS 0.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 2%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Flux notification-controller is the event forwarder and notification dispatcher for the GitOps Toolkit controllers. Prior to 1.8.3, the gcr Receiver type in Flux notification-controller does not validate the email claim of Google OIDC tokens used for Pub/Sub push authentication. This allows any valid Google-issued token, to authenticate against the Receiver webhook endpoint, triggering unauthorized Flux reconciliations. Exploitation requires the attacker to know the Receiver's webhook URL. The webhook path is generated as /hook/sha256sum(token+name+namespace), where the token is a random string stored in a Kubernetes Secret. There is no API or endpoint that enumerates webhook URLs. An attacker cannot discover the path without either having access to the cluster and permissions to read the Receiver's .status.webhookPath in the target namespace, or obtaining the URL through other means (e.g. leaked secrets or access to Pub/Sub config). Upon successful authentication, the controller triggers a reconciliation for all resources listed in the Receiver's .spec.resources. However, the practical impact is limited: Flux reconciliation is idempotent, so if the desired state in the configured sources (Git, OCI, Helm) has not changed, the reconciliation results in a no-op with no effect on cluster state. Additionally, Flux controllers deduplicate reconciliation requests, sending many requests in a short period results in only a single reconciliation being processed. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.8.3.

Patch / fix

  • go github.com/fluxcd/notification-controller 1.8.3
  • govulncheck-vulndb openSUSE Leap 16.0 0.0.20260723T184607-160000.1.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2026:21483-1

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
6 mo ago

Exploit prediction

0.13% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 2% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

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

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
go github.com/fluxcd/notification-controller
<1.8.3
1.8.3

Affected products

  • fluxcd notification-controller

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-287 Improper Authentication
  • CWE-345 Insufficient Verification of Data Authenticity

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.