Critical [CVE-2026-72508] hub and spoke ServiceAccounts bound to wildcard RBAC (*/*/*)
This critical-severity Red Hat Linux advisory covers CVE-2026-72508 affecting Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.
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Summary
A flaw was found in the multicloud-operators-subscription component of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (RHACM). This vulnerability allows a namespace-admin tenant to perform a confused-deputy attack by creating Subscription Custom Resources (CRs) that leverage a highly privileged ServiceAccount (SA).
This enables the tenant to deploy arbitrary cluster-scoped resources, leading to privilege escalation and potential arbitrary code execution across the cluster. The application-manager addon's ServiceAccount is granted broad wildcard permissions by default, enabling a malicious tenant to deploy arbitrary cluster-scoped resources.
This significantly increases the blast radius beyond typical namespace boundaries. Red Hat severity: Important — CVSS 9.9 (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H).
Weakness: CWE-250. Affected Red Hat products: Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.
Red Hat does not currently list a fixing RHSA for this CVE.
Affected versions
No affected-version range was extracted from the source record. The vendor advisory is authoritative — check it before change work.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 1 hour ago·verify at source
Fixed versions
No fixed release is recorded yet. That does not prove no patch exists — confirm against the vendor advisory.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 1 hour ago·verify at source
Mitigation checklist
- To mitigate this issue, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes administrators should configure the application-manager addon to use the least-privilege RBAC variant. This involves applying the addon/manifests/permission/role.yaml configuration, which restricts the permissions granted to the application-manager ServiceAccount. Consult Red Hat documentation for specific instructions on how to apply custom RBAC configurations for RHACM addons. Applying this change may require a restart or reload of the affected components to take effect.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 1 hour ago·verify at source
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