Executive brief
Strimzi is a tool used to manage Apache Kafka clusters on Kubernetes. A security flaw allows a user with limited access in one area of the system to gain full control over sensitive credentials (Secrets) in other areas. This could lead to unauthorized data access or the ability to disrupt services across different parts of the organization's infrastructure.
Technical details
A privilege escalation vulnerability exists in Strimzi Kafka Operator due to improper privilege management in the Topic and User operators. When the 'watchedNamespace' field is configured in a Kafka custom resource, the Cluster Operator automatically creates a Role with full CRUD permissions on Secrets in the target namespace and binds it to the entity operator ServiceAccount. An attacker with permissions to create Kafka resources in one namespace can specify a different target namespace to gain unauthorized access to its Secrets. This exploit is possible for any namespace where the Cluster Operator has existing permissions. The issue is fixed in versions 1.0.1 and 1.1.0 by requiring an explicit environment variable to enable the watched namespace feature.
Affected products
- Strimzi strimzi-kafka-operator <= 1.0.0
Timeline
- 2026-06-17: disclosed
- 2026-06-18: advisory
- 2026-06-18: patched