CVE-2026-77524 PUBLISHED

KEDA: Privilege escalation from namespace admin to cluster admin via KEDA TriggerAuthentication

Assigner: GitHub_M
Reserved: 20.08.2026 Published: 14.10.2026 Updated: 14.10.2026

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.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS Score: 9.9

Product Status

Vendor kedacore
Product keda
Versions
  • Version < 2.21.0 is affected

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-269: Improper Privilege Management CWE
  • CWE-918: Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) CWE