CVE-2020-1701 Permissions bypass in KubeVirt

What is CVE-2020-1701?

CVE-2020-1701 is a medium-severity missing authorization vulnerability in virt-handler, published on 27 May 2021. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

A flaw was found in the KubeVirt main virt-handler versions before 0.26.0 regarding the access permissions of virt-handler. An attacker with access to create VMs could attach any secret within their namespace, allowing them to read the contents of that secret.

Weakness: CWE-732

Which versions are affected by CVE-2020-1701?

3 open source packages ship an affected version, including kubevirt.io/kubevirt. It affects 1 product.

Products include Kubevirt Kubevirt.

How do I fix CVE-2020-1701?

Upgrade kubevirt.io/kubevirt to 0.26.0 or later.

Upgrade, and check permissions on every request on the server, not only in the interface. More about Missing authorization.

Is CVE-2020-1701 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2020-1701 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in virt-handler

• CVE-2020-14316 Privilege Escalation in kubevirt Critical 9.9
• CVE-2022-1798 Path Traversal vulnerability in Kubevirt High 8.7
• CVE-2025-64324 KubeVirt Vulnerable to Arbitrary Host File Read and Write High 8.5
• CVE-2023-26484 On a compromised KubeVirt node, the virt-handler service account can be used to modify all node specs High 8.2
• CVE-2026-13201 Path traversal in Red Hat Container Native Virtualization 4.12 High 7.3

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as GHSA-849r-8wvp-4wwg, GO-2024-2765.