Vulnerability · Published Aug 13, 2026 · Assigned by elastic
CVE-2026-72640Unintended Proxy or Intermediary in Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes Leading to Cross-Namespace Secret Disclosure
Medium 6.5
In plain English
A medium-severity security flaw in Eck Operator from Elastic. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.4% (higher than 32% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official description
The Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) operator reads a list of secret references from an annotation on secrets it manages, and it accepts the namespace recorded in each reference without validating that the reference is authorized for the resource being reconciled. A user whose Kubernetes permissions are limited to their own namespace can write that annotation, trigger a reconcile, and cause the operator to use its cluster-wide secret permissions to copy the contents of a secret from any other namespace into a secret the user can read.
Affected products (as reported)
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| Elastic | Eck Operator | 3.0.0 – through 3.4.1 |
Weakness: CWE-441 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N