CVE-2026-72648 PUBLISHED

Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in an Environment Variable in Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes Leading to Information Disclosure

Assigner: elastic
Reserved: 10.08.2026 Published: 13.08.2026 Updated: 13.08.2026

Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in an Environment Variable (CWE-526) in Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) can lead to information disclosure via Retrieve Embedded Sensitive Data (CAPEC-37). When ECK reconciles a Fleet Server resource that authenticates to Elasticsearch with a service account token, the token is written into the generated workload specification in cleartext rather than being referenced from the Kubernetes Secret that ECK maintains for the other credentials on the same path. Any principal able to read workload specifications in the affected namespace can therefore read a live Elasticsearch credential, even when Kubernetes RBAC does not grant that principal access to Secrets.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CVSS Score: 6.5

Product Status

Vendor Elastic
Product Eck Operator
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 3.0.0 to 3.4.1 (incl.)

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-526 Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in an Environment Variable CWE

Impacts

  • CAPEC-37 Retrieve Embedded Sensitive Data