Vulnerability · Published Sep 8, 2026 · Assigned by redhat

CVE-2026-78234Hawtio-operator: hawtio-operator: service-ca signing oracle allows arbitrary-cn certificate issuance to namespace edit users

Critical 9.9

In plain English

A critical-severity improper certificate validation in Red Hat build of Apache Camel - HawtIO 4 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 0.4% (higher than 33% of all known vulnerabilities).

Severity (CVSS 3.1)9.9Critical

Exploit odds (30 days)0.4%top 66.9% of all CVEs

Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: none

Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

A flaw was found in hawtio-operator. The operator reads the OpenShift Service CA private signing key from the openshift-service-ca namespace and uses it to mint client certificates with a Subject Common Name (CN) supplied by the author of a namespaced Hawtio custom resource. Because the operator ships a ClusterRole that aggregates Hawtio CR permissions into the edit and admin roles, any user with edit access in any namespace can obtain a Service-CA-signed certificate with an arbitrary subject. This certificate can be used to impersonate any in-cluster service identity to peers that trust the Service CA for client authentication, including Jolokia agents and other Service-CA-trusting components.

Affected products (as reported)

Vendor	Product	Versions
Red Hat	Red Hat build of Apache Camel - HawtIO 4	see references
Red Hat	Red Hat build of Apache Camel - HawtIO 4	see references
Red Hat	Red Hat build of Apache Camel - HawtIO 4	see references

Weakness: CWE-295 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

References

https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-78234 vdb-entry, x_refsource_REDHAT
RHBZ#2524894 issue-tracking, x_refsource_REDHAT