CVE-2024-45041External Secrets Operator vulnerable to privilege escalation
- 8.3HighCVSS base score
- 0.59%Exploitation in 30 daysEPSS · top 51% of all CVEs
- NoKnown exploitednot in CISA's KEV catalog
- YesPublic exploitsa reference or SSVC says so
Description
External Secrets Operator is a Kubernetes operator that integrates external secret management systems. The external-secrets has a deployment called default-external-secrets-cert-controller, which is bound with a same-name ClusterRole. This ClusterRole has "get/list" verbs of secrets resources. It also has path/update verb of validatingwebhookconfigurations resources. This can be used to abuse the SA token of the deployment to retrieve or get ALL secrets in the whole cluster, capture and log all data from requests attempting to update Secrets, or make a webhook deny all Pod create and update requests. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.10.2.
Public exploit
An exploit or proof of concept is public: anyone can try it against an unpatched system. CISA's SSVC rates its exploitation: a proof of concept is public.
Timeline
ID reserved
By GitHub_M
- 19 days later
· 19 days later
Published
Changes after publication (a new score, a public exploit, EPSS crossing 1, 10 or 50 %, leaving KEV) are kept since November 2026; earlier ones are not known.
Scores
| Scored by | CVSS | Score | Vector |
|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub_MCNA (assigner) | 3.1 | High8.3 | CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:L/A:H |
| NVDNVD · Analyzed | 3.1 | High8.8 | CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H |
- EPSS (exploitation in 30 days)
- 0.59% · top 51% of all CVEs (13 Nov 2026)
- CISA SSVC
- Exploitation: poc · Automatable: no · Technical impact: partial
The list uses the assigner's score when there is one, then CISA's, then NVD's: High 8.3.
Affected products
external-secrets · external-secrets
- affected < 0.10.2
Affected packages
From reviewed advisories of the GitHub Advisory Database.
- Gogithub.com/external-secrets/external-secretsGHSA-qwgc-rr35-h4x9 (opens in a new tab)
References
Sources
The same CVE in the primary databases and aggregators, to check against.
- CVE.org record (opens in a new tab)
- CVE List JSON (GitHub) (opens in a new tab)
- NVD (opens in a new tab)
- FIRST EPSS (opens in a new tab)
- EUVD EUVD-2024-2861 (opens in a new tab)
- OSV.dev (opens in a new tab)
- GitHub Advisory GHSA-qwgc-rr35-h4x9 (opens in a new tab)
- CIRCL Vulnerability-Lookup (opens in a new tab)
Badge for a README or a ticket
[](https://cveledger.app/cve/CVE-2024-45041)Record last updated .