CVE-2025-71426 PUBLISHED

Contrast before 1.4.1 Coordinator Impersonation via Unauthenticated Recovery

Assigner: VulnCheck
Reserved: 27.09.2026 Published: 27.09.2026 Updated: 27.09.2026

Contrast is a confidential-computing runtime for Kubernetes. In versions before 1.4.1, a recovering Coordinator does not verify the seed supplied by the recovering party. An attacker can therefore stand up a rogue Coordinator whose manifest passes validation but whose secret seed is attacker-controlled. If network traffic is redirected from the legitimate Coordinator to the attacker's Coordinator, a workload owner can be impersonated when they either set a new manifest without comparing the returned root CA certificate against the existing one (the default behavior of the contrast CLI) or verify the Coordinator without comparing the root CA certificate against a trusted reference. Under these conditions the attacker can issue certificates that chain back to the rogue Coordinator's root CA and recover arbitrary workload secrets of workloads deployed after the attack. Secrets of the legitimate Coordinator (seed, workload secrets, CA), workload integrity, and certificates chaining to the mesh CA are not affected.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:P/VC:L/VI:H/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
CVSS Score: 7.1

Product Status

Vendor edgelesssys
Product contrast
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 0 to 1.4.1 (excl.)
  • Version 1.4.1 is unaffected

Credits

  • 3u13r finder
  • burgerdev finder
  • katexochen finder

References

Problem Types

  • Improper Authorization CWE