High [CVE-2026-77968] Hawtio-operator: hawtio-operator: cluster-wide secrets read/write granted to operator serviceaccount
This high-severity Red Hat Linux advisory covers CVE-2026-77968 affecting Red Hat build of Apache Camel - HawtIO 4.
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Summary
A flaw was found in hawtio-operator. The operator's ClusterRole grants secrets: [create, get, list, update, watch] across all namespaces.
While the operator uses a controller-runtime label-selector cache as a memory optimization, the ServiceAccount token authorizes read access to every Secret in the cluster. The operator also bypasses the cache via direct API calls.
Compromise of the operator pod would yield read access to every Secret in the cluster, including bootstrap tokens, cloud credentials, and other operators' secrets. Red Hat has determined that this vulnerability is Important severity.
While exploitation requires prior compromise of the operator pod, the blast radius is the entire cluster's Secret corpus. Red Hat recommends scoping permissions to namespaced Roles created on demand for each Hawtio instance, with resourceNames restrictions for the Service CA secret.
Weakness: CWE-269. Affected Red Hat products: Red Hat build of Apache Camel - HawtIO 4.
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 2 hours 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 2 hours ago·verify at source
Mitigation checklist
- Restrict access to the hawtio-operator namespace and limit who can exec into the operator pod. Monitor cluster audit logs for unexpected Secret access patterns from the hawtio-operator ServiceAccount. As a defence-in-depth measure, apply a NetworkPolicy to the operator namespace restricting egress to only the Kubernetes API server and required service endpoints.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 2 hours ago·verify at source
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