Operator-sdk: privilege escalation due to incorrect permissions of /etc/passwd

Primary CVSS: v3.1 6.4 MEDIUM from [email protected]

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

EPSS: 0.002050000 probability, percentile 0.105980000 (date 2026-06-29)

Problem Types: CWE-276 | CWE-276 Incorrect Default Permissions

Discovery Credit

CNA: Red Hat would like to thank Antony Di Scala, James Force, and Michael Whale for reporting this issue. (en)

Workarounds

CNA: In Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, the following default configurations reduce the impact of this vulnerability. Security Context Constraints (SCCs): The default SCC, Restricted-v2, applies several crucial security settings to containers. Capabilities: drop: ALL removes all Linux capabilities, including SETUID and SETGID. This prevents a process from changing its user or group ID, a common step in privilege escalation attacks. The SETUID and SETGID capabilities can also be dropped explicitly if other capabilities are still required. allowPrivilegeEscalation: false ensures that a process cannot gain more privileges than its parent process. This blocks attempts by a compromised container process to grant itself additional capabilities. SELinux Mandatory Access Control (MAC): Pods are required to run with a pre-allocated Multi-Category Security (MCS) label. This SELinux feature provides a strong layer of isolation between containers and from the host system. A properly configured SELinux policy can prevent a container escape, even if an attacker gains elevated permissions within the container itself. Filesystem Hardening: While not a default setting, a common security practice is to set readOnlyRootFilesystem: true in a container's security context. In this specific scenario, this configuration would prevent an attacker from modifying critical files like /etc/passwd, even if they managed to gain file-level write permissions.