Privilege Escalation in hawtio-operator: Service-CA Signed Cert Abuse
CVE-2026-78234 Published on September 8, 2026
Hawtio-operator: hawtio-operator: service-ca signing oracle allows arbitrary-cn certificate issuance to namespace edit users
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.
Vulnerability Analysis
CVE-2026-78234 is exploitable with network access, and requires small amount of 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. 111 days later.
Weakness Type
Improper Certificate Validation
The software does not validate, or incorrectly validates, a certificate. When a certificate is invalid or malicious, it might allow an attacker to spoof a trusted entity by interfering in the communication path between the host and client. The software might connect to a malicious host while believing it is a trusted host, or the software might be deceived into accepting spoofed data that appears to originate from a trusted host.
Products Associated with CVE-2026-78234
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