Privilege escalation in Aiven Aiven-Operator

CVE-2026-39961

Aiven Operator allows you to provision and manage Aiven Services from your Kubernetes cluster. From 0.31.0 to before 0.37.0, a developer with create permission on ClickhouseUser CRDs in their own namespace can exfiltrate secrets from any other namespace — production database credentials, API keys, service tokens — with a single kubectl apply. The operator reads the victim's secret using its ClusterRole and writes the password into a new secret in the attacker's namespace. The operator acts as a confused deputy: its ServiceAccount has cluster-wide secret read/write (aiven-operator-role ClusterRole), and it trusts user-supplied namespace values in spec.connInfoSecretSource.namespace without validation. No admission webhook enforces this boundary — the ServiceUser webhook returns nil, and no ClickhouseUser webhook exists. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.37.0.

Vulnerability class: Privilege Escalation

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 6.8 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:N.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.005 (39.2th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 39th percentile — 39.2% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2026-39961: held from 0.004 to 0.005.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.004 · newest: 0.005 · change: +0.001

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-39961?
CVE-2026-39961 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Aiven Aiven-Operator, classified under Improper Privilege Management. CVSS score: 6.8/10. Published 2026-04-09.
How severe is CVE-2026-39961?
Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 6.8 out of 10.