CVE-2026-39961

Summary

Aiven Operator allows you to provision and manage Aiven Services from your Kubernetes cluster. From 0.31.0 to before 0.37.0, a developer with create permission on ClickhouseUser CRDs in their own namespace can exfiltrate secrets from any other namespace — production database credentials, API keys, service tokens — with a single kubectl apply. The operator reads the victim's secret using its ClusterRole and writes the password into a new secret in the attacker's namespace. The operator acts as a confused deputy: its ServiceAccount has cluster-wide secret read/write (aiven-operator-role ClusterRole), and it trusts user-supplied namespace values in spec.connInfoSecretSource.namespace without validation. No admission webhook enforces this boundary — the ServiceUser webhook returns nil, and no ClickhouseUser webhook exists. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.37.0.

Affected Software

VendorProductVersion RangeStatus
aivenaiven-operator< 0.37.0affected

Weaknesses

  • CWE-269: CWE-269: Improper Privilege Management
  • CWE-441: CWE-441: Unintended Proxy or Intermediary ('Confused Deputy')

ADP Enrichment

CISA ADP Vulnrichment

  • SSVC:
  • Exploitation: none
    • Automatable: no
    • Technical Impact: partial

References