KEDA: Privilege escalation from namespace admin to cluster admin via KEDA TriggerAuthentication

Why it is Amber

• CVSS 9.9 critical
• On your watchlist: Go

Affected packages

References

• https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-637c-6jxx-4rwm
• https://github.com/kedacore/keda/security/advisories/GHSA-637c-6jxx-4rwm
• https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-77524
• https://github.com/kedacore/keda/commit/1e21cc798dedd079e696cdb45388eddc5e18365d
• https://github.com/kedacore/keda/releases/tag/v2.21.0
• https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-637c-6jxx-4rwm

Original description

KEDA is a Kubernetes-based Event Driven Autoscaling component. In version 2.20.2 and earlier, a namespace administrator who can create TriggerAuthentication and ScaledObject resources can set hashiCorpVault.address to a tenant-controlled endpoint and select Kubernetes authentication without an explicit credential. KEDA then uses the operator pod's projected ServiceAccount token and sends it to that endpoint as a Vault login credential. The JWT-shape filter from the prior CVE-2025-68476 remediation accepts the operator token because its subject is a Kubernetes ServiceAccount, so the attacker can obtain the operator's cluster-wide permissions, including broad Secret reads and workload or admission-related operations. This vulnerability is fixed in 2.21.0.