CVE-2024-45041: External-Secrets External Secrets Operator

High severity, CVSS 8.8. EPSS: 0.6% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

External Secrets Operator is a Kubernetes operator that integrates external secret management systems. The external-secrets has a deployment called default-external-secrets-cert-controller, which is bound with a same-name ClusterRole. This ClusterRole has "get/list" verbs of secrets resources. It also has path/update verb of validatingwebhookconfigurations resources. This can be used to abuse the SA token of the deployment to retrieve or get ALL secrets in the whole cluster, capture and log all data from requests attempting to update Secrets, or make a webhook deny all Pod create and update requests. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.10.2.

Affected products

• External-Secrets External Secrets Operator: before 0.10.2 (fixed in 0.10.2)

Published 2024-09-09. Last modified 2026-06-17.