Vulnerability · Published Sep 27, 2026 · Assigned by VulnCheck

CVE-2025-71426Contrast before 1.4.1 Coordinator Impersonation via Unauthenticated Recovery

High 7.1

In plain English

A high-severity security flaw in contrast from edgelesssys. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.1% (higher than 3% of all known vulnerabilities). Fixed versions are available - upgrade the affected package.

Severity (CVSS 3.1)7.1High
Exploit odds (30 days)0.1%top 96.6% of all CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: none
Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

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.

Affected packages & fixed versions

EcosystemPackageFixed inAdvisory
Gogithub.com/edgelesssys/contrast1.4.1GHSA-vqv5-385r-2hf8
Gogithub.com/edgelesssys/contrast1.4.1GO-2025-3455

Affected products (as reported)

VendorProductVersions
edgelesssys contrast 0 – before 1.4.1

Weakness: CWE-285 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:L/I:H/A:N

References