CVE-2026-10090 Privilege escalation in Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.11
Namespace edit users can escalate to cluster-admin by deploying malicious Helm charts via Application Subscription due to missing authorization checks.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- An administrator
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- None listed
What is CVE-2026-10090?
CVE-2026-10090 is a critical vulnerability in Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.11, published on 5 Aug 2026. An attacker needs administrator access to exploit it, with no action from the victim.
Official description
A flaw was found in the Application Subscription controller (multicluster-operators-subscription) of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes (ACM). A user with namespace-scoped "edit" privileges in an ACM hub namespace can create a Channel resource pointing to a Helm repository they control and a Subscription resource referencing it. The app-subscription controller fetches and applies the Helm chart contents with its own elevated authority, without verifying whether the subscription creator holds the "open-cluster-management:subscription-admin" role and without restricting applied resources to the subscription namespace. This allows the attacker to include cluster-scoped resources in the Helm chart, such as a ClusterRoleBinding granting the attacker's ServiceAccount the "cluster-admin" ClusterRole. Successful exploitation results in full cluster-admin privilege escalation. This contradicts the ACM documentation which states that non-subscription-admin users should have resources deployed into the subscription namespace only.
Weakness: CWE-267
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-10090?
How do I fix CVE-2026-10090?
No fix has been published for CVE-2026-10090 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Is CVE-2026-10090 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-10090 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as GHSA-g9vp-wj77-5767.