Details have been made public about a now-patched high-severity flaw in Kubernetes that could allow a malicious attacker to achieve remote code execution with elevated privileges under specific circumstances.
“The vulnerability allows remote code execution with SYSTEM privileges on all Windows endpoints within a Kubernetes cluster,” Akamai security researcher Tomer Peled said. “To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker needs to apply malicious YAML files on the cluster.”
Tracked as CVE-2023-5528 (CVSS score: 7.2), the shortcoming impacts all versions of kubelet, including and after version 1.8.0. It was addressed as part of updates released on November 14, 2023, in the following versions –
- kubelet v1.28.4
- kubelet v1.27.8
- kubelet v1.26.11, and
- kubelet v1.25.16
“A security issue was discovered in Kubernetes where a user that can create pods and persistent volumes on Windows nodes may be able to escalate to admin privileges on those nodes,” Kubernetes maintainers said in an advisory released at the time. “Kubernetes clusters are only affected if they are using an in-tree storage plugin for Windows nodes.”