CVE-2026-18949
Description
A flaw was found in odh-dashboard. This vulnerability allows an attacker, who has compromised the dashboard's Service Account (SA) token, to exploit overly broad permissions granted to the SA. This enables the attacker to escalate their privileges to cluster-administrator level, gain access to sensitive data like credentials and keys across the entire cluster, and disrupt multi-tenant isolation.
Statement
This is a Critical vulnerability in Red Hat OpenShift AI where the odh-dashboard ClusterRole grants its Service Account excessive cluster-wide permissions. A compromised dashboard Service Account could read and delete sensitive secrets across the cluster and create ClusterRoleBindings, leading to full cluster-admin privilege escalation and breaking multi-tenant isolation. This risk is present in Red Hat OpenShift AI deployments with the dashboard component enabled.
Mitigation
To mitigate this issue, restrict access to the `opendatahub` namespace to limit potential compromise of the dashboard pod. Implement egress `NetworkPolicy` rules to control and restrict outbound network traffic from the dashboard. Additionally, configure audit log alerting to monitor for and detect any unexpected creation of `ClusterRoleBindings` within the cluster.
Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details
Info alert:Important note
CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authority (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications).
CVSS v3 Score Breakdown
| Red Hat | NVD | cve.org | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base Score | 8.8 | N/A | 8.8 |
| Attack Vector | Network | N/A | Network |
| Attack Complexity | Low | N/A | Low |
| Privileges Required | Low | N/A | Low |
| User Interaction | None | N/A | None |
| Scope | Unchanged | N/A | Unchanged |
| Confidentiality | High | N/A | High |
| Integrity Impact | High | N/A | High |
| Availability Impact | High | N/A | High |
Vector
Red Hat: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
cve.org: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Understanding the Weakness (CWE)
Confidentiality,Integrity,Availability,Access Control
Technical Impact: Gain Privileges or Assume Identity; Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands; Read Application Data; DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart
An attacker will be able to gain access to any resources that are allowed by the extra privileges. Common results include executing code, disabling services, and reading restricted data. New weaknesses can be exposed because running with extra privileges, such as root or Administrator, can disable the normal security checks being performed by the operating system or surrounding environment. Other pre-existing weaknesses can turn into security vulnerabilities if they occur while operating at raised privileges.
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