Impersonation Vulnerability in Hawtio Operator on OpenShift by Red Hat
CVE-2026-78234

9.9CRITICAL

Key Information:

Vendor

Red Hat
Status
Red Hat Build Of Apache Camel - Hawtio 4
Vendor
CVE Published:
8 September 2026

What is CVE-2026-78234?

A flaw exists in the Hawtio Operator that allows it to read the OpenShift Service CA private signing key from the openshift-service-ca namespace. This flaw enables the operator to mint client certificates, using a Subject Common Name (CN) provided by users of a namespaced Hawtio custom resource. Given that the operator includes a ClusterRole that combines permissions from Hawtio CR into the edit and admin roles, any user with edit access within any namespace can generate a Service-CA-signed certificate with an arbitrary subject. This certificate poses a serious risk, as it can be exploited to impersonate any in-cluster service identity when interacting with components that trust the Service CA for authentication.

References

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

CVSS V3.1

Score:
9.9
Severity:
CRITICAL
Confidentiality:
High
Integrity:
High
Availability:
High
Attack Vector:
Network
Attack Complexity:
Low
Privileges Required:
Low
User Interaction:
None
Scope:
Changed

Timeline

  • Vulnerability published

  • Vulnerability Reserved

.