Operator - Namespaced User Path Traversal

CVE-2026-11769

What is CVE-2026-11769?

We have released version 5.24.0 of the Grafana Operator. This patch includes a CRITICAL severity security fix for a path traversal/privilege escalation vulnerability in the Grafana Operator.

Summary

The Grafana Operator supports loading dashboards & library panels using the jsonnet data templating language. The jsonnet expression is evaluated in the context of the operator manager pod.

Impact

It is possible for a malicious user who can create Dashboard or LibraryPanel resources for a Grafana instance to obtain the Kubernetes service account token of the Grafana Operator manager.

Affected versions

All Grafana Operator versions <= 5.23

Solutions and mitigations

All installations should be upgraded as soon as possible.

As a workaround, the following ValidatingAdmissionPolicy prevent the creation or modification of jsonnet based resources:

apiVersion: admissionregistration.k8s.io/v1

kind: ValidatingAdmissionPolicy

metadata:

name: "prevent-jsonnet-dashboards"

spec:

failurePolicy: Fail matchConstraints: resourceRules: - apiGroups: ["grafana.integreatly.org"] apiVersions: ["v1beta1"] operations: ["CREATE", "UPDATE"] resources: ["grafanadashboards", "grafanalibrarypanels"] validations: - expression: "!has(object.spec.jsonnetLib)"

---

apiVersion: admissionregistration.k8s.io/v1

kind: ValidatingAdmissionPolicyBinding

metadata:

name: "prevent-jsonnet-dashboards-clusterwide"

spec:

policyName: "prevent-jsonnet-dashboards" validationActions: [Deny]

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Artem Cherezov for responsibly disclosing the vulnerability.

References