Vulnerability · Published Aug 13, 2026 · Assigned by elastic
CVE-2026-72648Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in an Environment Variable in Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes Leading to Information 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 37% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official description
Cleartext Storage of Sensitive Information in an Environment Variable (CWE-526) in Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) can lead to information disclosure via Retrieve Embedded Sensitive Data (CAPEC-37). When ECK reconciles a Fleet Server resource that authenticates to Elasticsearch with a service account token, the token is written into the generated workload specification in cleartext rather than being referenced from the Kubernetes Secret that ECK maintains for the other credentials on the same path. Any principal able to read workload specifications in the affected namespace can therefore read a live Elasticsearch credential, even when Kubernetes RBAC does not grant that principal access to Secrets.
Affected products (as reported)
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| Elastic | Eck Operator | 3.0.0 – through 3.4.1 |
Weakness: CWE-526 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N