Description

A flaw was found in odh-dashboard. This vulnerability allows an attacker, who has compromised the dashboard's Service Account (SA) token, to exploit overly broad permissions granted to the SA. This enables the attacker to escalate their privileges to cluster-administrator level, gain access to sensitive data like credentials and keys across the entire cluster, and disrupt multi-tenant isolation.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "8.8",
  "pubDate": "2026-08-10T21:17:21.443Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-08-10T21:17:21.443Z",
  "executiveSummary": "A privilege escalation vulnerability has been identified within odh-dashboard, centering on an excessively permissive Service Account (SA) token configuration. The flaw allows an attacker who has successfully compromised the dashboard's Service Account token to leverage overly broad RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) permissions assigned to the service identity. This security deficiency breaches multi-tenant isolation boundaries across the orchestrator environment.\nThe primary impact of this vulnerability is complete cluster-level compromise. An authenticated adversary possessing the compromised token can transition their execution context from a restricted namespace or application-level context to a cluster-administrator level. This grants unrestricted read and write operations over critical cluster resources, including the extraction of sensitive data such as cryptographic keys, cluster secrets, service credentials, and infrastructure configurations.\nThe affected product is odh-dashboard. The risk implication is severe, as it transforms a localized service token compromise into a total infrastructure takeover. Exploitation requires the initial prerequisite of obtaining the target Service Account token via secondary compromise vectors or misconfigurations. Once acquired, no further exploitation primitives are necessary due to the inherent over-privileging of the underlying service account role.",
  "technicalDetails": "The root cause of the vulnerability stems from the principle of least privilege violation in the permission provisioning for odh-dashboard. The application's Service Account is provisioned with cluster-scoped administrative roles or overly broad API permissions that far exceed its operational requirements for dashboard functionality.\nThe vulnerability manifests when an attacker executes an attack flow initiated by acquiring the odh-dashboard Service Account token. Upon obtaining the valid bearer token, the adversary interacts directly with the Kubernetes API server, authenticating as the high-privileged service identity. Because the associated ClusterRole or Role bindings grant excessive permissions—such as verbs like '*' on resources like 'secrets', 'clusterroles', or 'pods' across all namespaces—the attacker bypasses standard tenant boundaries.\nThe step-by-step exploitation method involves: 1) Compromising the odh-dashboard Service Account token via application vulnerabilities, container escape, or insecure secret exposure; 2) Establishing authenticated connectivity to the Kubernetes API server using the harvested token; 3) Querying sensitive cluster resources, including cluster-wide secrets, kubeconfig files, and TLS certificates; 4) Creating or modifying administrative cluster role bindings or directly injecting malicious pods with host-level access to achieve arbitrary code execution and persistent cluster-administrator level control.\nThe vulnerable component is the permission assignment configuration associated with the odh-dashboard Service Account. Authentication requirements dictate that the attacker must possess the valid service account token to initiate the attack sequence, implying that the threat model typically encompasses a post-compromise scenario where initial access has already been established. Privilege requirements for the exploitation phase are implicitly satisfied by the flaws inherent in the token's assigned authorization scope. The network exposure is constrained by the accessibility of the orchestration API server, which is typically reachable internally by cluster workloads and potentially exposed externally depending on ingress configurations.\nThe post-exploitation impact includes complete loss of confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the entire cluster environment. The attacker gains the capability to inspect all multi-tenant workloads, deploy unauthorized services, manipulate network policies, and disrupt operational stability across the entire deployment."
}