Vulnerability · Published Oct 20, 2026 · Assigned by redhat

CVE-2026-105312Console-operator: streams for apache kafka console: tenant-controlled container image on clusterrole-bound pod enables namespace-to-cluster privilege escalation

Critical 9.9

In plain English

A critical-severity privilege mismanagement in streams for Apache Kafka 2 from Red Hat. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.3% (higher than 27% of all known vulnerabilities).

Severity (CVSS 3.1)9.9Critical

Exploit odds (30 days)0.3%top 72.9% of all CVEs

Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: none

Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

A Kubernetes tenant with create permission on Console custom resources can set spec.containers.api.spec.image to an arbitrary container image. The operator deploys this image into a pod whose ServiceAccount is bound via ClusterRoleBinding to a ClusterRole granting cluster-wide get/list/watch on all Strimzi CRDs (including KafkaUsers), patch on Kafkas/KafkaRebalances, and cluster-monitoring-view. The attacker's code reads the projected SA token and gains cross-tenant Strimzi control-plane read+write access.

Affected products (as reported)

Vendor	Product	Versions
Red Hat	StreamsHub Console for Apache Kafka®	0.2.0 – before 0.12.100.13.0 – before 0.14.2
Red Hat	streams for Apache Kafka 2	see references
Red Hat	streams for Apache Kafka 3	see references

Weakness: CWE-269 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:L

References

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-105312 vdb-entry, x_refsource_REDHAT
RHBZ#2510863 issue-tracking, x_refsource_REDHAT