Description

A flaw was found in OpenShift Pipelines-as-Code (PAC). PAC does not verify whether the creator of a Repository custom resource has permission to create PipelineRuns. A namespace user with only Repository and Secret create/delete permissions can cause PAC to execute attacker-controlled PipelineRuns as the auto-provisioned pipeline ServiceAccount, which carries ClusterRole/edit by default. This results in namespace-scoped privilege escalation, enabling Secret read, resource creation/modification/deletion, and potential supply chain injection in CI/CD namespaces.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "8.8",
  "pubDate": "2026-11-06T22:17:58.757Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-11-06T22:17:58.757Z",
  "executiveSummary": "OpenShift Pipelines-as-Code (PAC) is susceptible to a namespace-scoped privilege escalation vulnerability stemming from improper authorization checks during the processing of Repository custom resources.\nThe vulnerability allows an authenticated namespace user, possessing only restricted permissions (Repository and Secret create/delete), to trigger arbitrary PipelineRun executions.\nBecause PAC executes these PipelineRuns using an auto-provisioned ServiceAccount that defaults to the ClusterRole/edit permission level, an attacker can effectively bypass intended namespace security boundaries.\nThis flaw presents a significant risk to CI/CD integrity, enabling unauthorized Secret access, arbitrary resource manipulation, and potential supply chain injection attacks within the affected namespace.\nExploitation requires the attacker to have legitimate access to create Repository objects within a namespace, after which they can manipulate PAC to execute attacker-controlled workloads with elevated privileges.\nThe vulnerability impacts the security posture of the entire CI/CD pipeline, as the elevated ServiceAccount privileges allow for broader administrative actions than those originally granted to the user.",
  "technicalDetails": "The root cause of this vulnerability lies in an authorization bypass within the OpenShift Pipelines-as-Code (PAC) controller. When a user creates a Repository custom resource, the PAC controller fails to validate if the user possess the necessary RBAC permissions to initiate a PipelineRun.\nIn a standard OpenShift deployment, PAC automatically provisions a dedicated ServiceAccount to manage pipeline execution. By design, this ServiceAccount is assigned the ClusterRole/edit role, which grants broad permissions for creating, updating, and deleting most resources within the namespace, including the ability to read Secrets.\nThe attack flow begins when a malicious actor with minimal namespace-level access creates a crafted Repository custom resource. Since PAC lacks an authorization check on the creator of the Repository object, it proceeds to process the request and initiates a PipelineRun based on the configuration defined by the attacker.\nBecause the controller executes the resulting PipelineRun using the aforementioned auto-provisioned ServiceAccount, the underlying Kubelet executes the task with the privileges of that ServiceAccount rather than the privileges of the user who initiated the request. This effectively elevates the attacker's context from a restricted user to the broader 'edit' privilege level associated with the pipeline ServiceAccount.\nPost-exploitation, an attacker can leverage this elevated context to perform several actions: they can exfiltrate sensitive data stored in Kubernetes Secrets, modify CI/CD definitions to inject malicious code into build processes (leading to supply chain compromise), or delete critical resources within the namespace to cause a denial-of-service condition.\nThis vulnerability highlights a critical failure in the Principle of Least Privilege, as the auto-provisioned ServiceAccount is granted excessive default permissions, and the automation layer (PAC) fails to enforce access control checks before utilizing that identity for workload execution.\nThe impact is confined to the namespace level, but within a multi-tenant environment, this represents a complete compromise of the affected namespace's security integrity. No specialized network exposure is required for exploitation; it is strictly an internal authorization failure within the Kubernetes control plane interaction."
}