Privilege Escalation via Unvalidated Env Setup in Red Hat Search Operator
CVE-2026-71470 Published on August 19, 2026
Acm-search-v2-rhel9: search-v2-operator: search cr imageoverride/arguments/envvar flow unsanitized into pods running impersonating sa
A flaw was found in the search-v2-operator. This vulnerability allows a privileged user, specifically a Custom Resource (CR) editor, to manipulate Search CR fields such as imageOverride, arguments, and environment variables without proper validation. By exploiting this, an attacker can mount arbitrary secrets into a search container's environment or replace the container image with an attacker-controlled one. This leads to privilege escalation and can result in a full cluster compromise due to the ServiceAccount's extensive impersonation permissions.
Vulnerability Analysis
CVE-2026-71470 is exploitable with network access, and requires user privileges. This vulnerability is considered to have a low attack complexity. The potential impact of an exploit of this vulnerability is considered to be critical as this vulnerability has a high impact to the confidentiality, integrity and availability of this component.
Timeline
Reported to Red Hat.
Made public. 13 days later.
Weakness Type
Improper Control of Dynamically-Managed Code Resources
The software does not properly restrict reading from or writing to dynamically-managed code resources such as variables, objects, classes, attributes, functions, or executable instructions or statements. Many languages offer powerful features that allow the programmer to dynamically create or modify existing code, or resources used by code such as variables and objects. While these features can offer significant flexibility and reduce development time, they can be extremely dangerous if attackers can directly influence these code resources in unexpected ways.
Products Associated with CVE-2026-71470
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