Paper/Archive/CVE-2026-77524

CVE-2026-77524

kedacore keda — KEDA: Privilege escalation from namespace admin to cluster admin via KEDA TriggerAuthentication

Description · from the CVE record

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.

Affected

ProductAffectedFixed inSource
keda< 2.21.0–CNA

Scores by source

GitHub_M (CNA)9.9CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
CISA ADPSSVCExploitation: poc · Automatable: no · Technical impact: total

References

refgithub.com/kedacore/keda/security/advisories/GHSA-637c-6jxx-4rwmrefgithub.com/kedacore/keda/commit/1e21cc798dedd079e696cdb45388eddc5e18365drefgithub.com/kedacore/keda/releases/tag/v2.21.0