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.
Metrics
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:LWeakness enumeration
Affected software
Source: the vendor's advisory (CNA). NVD analysis pending.
No affected versions have been published.
Timeline
- Published
- Aug 5, 2026
- Last modified
- Oct 23, 2026
- NVD status
- Awaiting Analysis