CVE-2025-71426 Contrast before 1.4.1 Coordinator Impersonation via Unauthenticated Recovery
Attackers can impersonate coordinators to recover workload secrets if users fail to verify root CA certificates during recovery.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- A user has to click or open something
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2025-71426?
CVE-2025-71426 is a high-severity authentication bypass vulnerability in edgelesssys contrast, published on 27 Sep 2026. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.
Official description
Contrast is a confidential-computing runtime for Kubernetes. In versions before 1.4.1, a recovering Coordinator does not verify the seed supplied by the recovering party. An attacker can therefore stand up a rogue Coordinator whose manifest passes validation but whose secret seed is attacker-controlled. If network traffic is redirected from the legitimate Coordinator to the attacker's Coordinator, a workload owner can be impersonated when they either set a new manifest without comparing the returned root CA certificate against the existing one (the default behavior of the contrast CLI) or verify the Coordinator without comparing the root CA certificate against a trusted reference. Under these conditions the attacker can issue certificates that chain back to the rogue Coordinator's root CA and recover arbitrary workload secrets of workloads deployed after the attack. Secrets of the legitimate Coordinator (seed, workload secrets, CA), workload integrity, and certificates chaining to the mesh CA are not affected.
Weakness: CWE-285
Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-71426?
3 open source packages ship an affected version, including github.com/edgelesssys/contrast.
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
github.com/edgelesssys/contrast Go | All versions | 1.4.1 |
github.com/edgelesssys/contrast Go | All versions | 1.4.1 |
github.com/edgelesssys/contrast Go | All versions | 1.4.1 |
How do I fix CVE-2025-71426?
Upgrade github.com/edgelesssys/contrast to 1.4.1 or later.
Upgrade, and rotate credentials and sessions that may have been exposed. More about Authentication bypass.
Is CVE-2025-71426 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-71426 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as GHSA-m5hp-85q9-x6vh, GHSA-vqv5-385r-2hf8, GO-2025-3455.