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Vulnerability record · CVE-2026-78234 · published 8 September 2026

CVE-2026-78234: Improper certificate validation vulnerability

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.

9.9 CVSS 3.1 Critical EPSS 0.39% · top 69.7% CWE-295 · Improper certificate validation Awaiting Analysis
9.9CVSS 3.1 base score
0.39%EPSS exploitation probability, 30 days
NoNot in CISA KEV
0Affected product versions listed by NVD
2References
8 Sep 2026Last modified by NVD

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.

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

References

LinkTags
https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-78234
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2524894

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Source: NIST National Vulnerability Database (record CVE-2026-78234), CISA KEV, FIRST EPSS (scores of 2026-09-26). This page is refreshed as NVD updates the record.