A flaw was found in the Application Subscription controller (multicluster-operators-subscription) of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes (ACM). A user with namespace-scoped edit privileges in an ACM hub namespace can create a Channel resource pointing to a Helm repository they control and a Subscription resource referencing it. The app-subscription controller fetches and applies the Helm chart contents with its own elevated authority, without verifying whether the subscription creator holds the open-cluster-management:subscription-admin role and without restricting applied resources to the subscription namespace. This allows the attacker to include cluster-scoped resources in the Helm chart, such as a ClusterRoleBinding granting the attackers ServiceAccount the cluster-admin ClusterRole. Successful exploitation results in full cluster-admin privilege escalation. This contradicts the ACM documentation which states that non-subscription-admin users should have resources deployed into the subscription namespace only.
A particular privilege, role, capability, or right can be used to perform unsafe actions that were not intended, even when it is assigned to the correct entity.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.11 | RedHat | rhacm2/multicluster-operators-subscription-rhel9:1787263584 | * |
| Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.13 | RedHat | rhacm2/multicluster-operators-subscription-rhel9:1787263693 | * |
| Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.14 | RedHat | rhacm2/multicluster-operators-subscription-rhel9:1787170830 | * |
| Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.15 | RedHat | rhacm2/multicluster-operators-subscription-rhel9:1787240030 | * |
| Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.16 | RedHat | rhacm2/multicluster-operators-subscription-rhel9:1787242321 | * |
| Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.17 | RedHat | rhacm2/multicluster-operators-subscription-rhel9:1787242108 | * |