CVE-2023-2728 Bypassing enforce mountable secrets policy imposed by the ServiceAccount admission plugin

What is CVE-2023-2728?

CVE-2023-2728 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Kubernetes Kubernetes, published on 3 Jul 2023. An attacker needs administrator access to exploit it, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Users may be able to launch containers that bypass the mountable secrets policy enforced by the ServiceAccount admission plugin when using ephemeral containers. The policy ensures pods running with a service account may only reference secrets specified in the service account’s secrets field. Kubernetes clusters are only affected if the ServiceAccount admission plugin and the `kubernetes.io/enforce-mountable-secrets` annotation are used together with ephemeral containers.

Weakness: CWE-20

Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-2728?

9 open source packages ship an affected version, including k8s.io/kubernetes. It affects 1 product.

Products include Kubernetes Kubernetes.

How do I fix CVE-2023-2728?

Upgrade k8s.io/kubernetes to a fixed version for your release line: 1.24.15, 1.25.11, 1.26.6 or 1.27.3.

Is CVE-2023-2728 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-2728 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Public exploit code: 1 proofs of concept on GitHub.

Other vulnerabilities in Kubernetes Kubernetes

• CVE-2018-1002105 Privilege Escalation in Kubernetes Critical 9.8
• CVE-2017-1000056 Kubernetes Privilege Escalation Critical 9.8
• CVE-2016-1906 Authorization bypass in Openshift Critical 9.8
• CVE-2023-3676 Kubernetes - Windows nodes - Insufficient input sanitization leads to privilege escalation High 8.8
• CVE-2023-3955 Kubernetes - Windows nodes - Insufficient input sanitization leads to privilege escalation High 8.8

All Kubernetes Kubernetes vulnerabilities

Sources

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

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2023-2728, GHSA-cgcv-5272-97pr, GO-2023-1892, openSUSE-SU-2024:13011-1.