CVE-2026-78234

critical
Assigned by CNA: redhat
Published 2026-09-08 · Modified 2026-09-08
CVSS v3
9.9
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS v4 NEW
not yet in upstream
VIR risk
9.9

Description

A flaw was found in hawtio-operator. The operator reads the OpenShift Service CA private signing key from the openshift-service-ca namespace and uses it to mint client certificates with a Subject Common Name (CN) supplied by the author of a namespaced Hawtio custom resource. Because the operator ships a ClusterRole that aggregates Hawtio CR permissions into the edit and admin roles, any user with edit access in any namespace can obtain a Service-CA-signed certificate with an arbitrary subject. This certificate can be used to impersonate any in-cluster service identity to peers that trust the Service CA for client authentication, including Jolokia agents and other Service-CA-trusting components.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood
98%
Patch ETA

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

Propose a mitigation on Community Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

References

CWEs

CWE-295

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.