CVE-2026-77524: KEDA: Privilege escalation from namespace admin to cluster admin via KEDA TriggerAuthentication

Should you act?

Critical, preconditions apply

Severe if exploited, but exploitation needs conditions that may not apply to you. This signal is computed from CISA KEV, EPSS and CVSS data; it is not an editorial verdict.

• Not in CISA KEV, but CISA’s SSVC assessment records a public proof-of-concept, so attack code exists.
• EPSS 0.6%, percentile 50: FIRST’s model estimates a 0.6% chance of exploitation activity in the next 30 days, higher than 50% of all scored CVEs (low). EPSS is a probability, not a verdict.
• Needs an account (low (any account)). Exposure depends on who can log in.
• Only applies if your dependency tree includes github.com/kedacore/keda (Go) <= 1.5.0, no fixed version listed; github.com/kedacore/keda/v2 (Go) < 2.21.0, fixed in 2.21.0. Check your lockfile, including transitive dependencies.

What it is

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.

From the GitHub advisory

Summary

A namespace admin who creates a TriggerAuthentication and a ScaledObject in their own namespace can make the KEDA operator send its own ServiceAccount token to a tenant-controlled URL. That token holds [""]/[""] get cluster-wide, so it reads every Secret in every namespace, plus batch/jobs and horizontalpodautoscalers create/delete cluster-wide, /scale update on any workload, validatingwebhookconfigurations update (rewrite or disable cluster admission), and apiservices update (hijack aggregated API routing). This is effectively privilege escalation from namespace admin to cluster admin in real environments: a cluster-wide Secret read alone is enough to find a token for a more privileged ServiceAccount, and the cluster-wide batch/jobs create lets the attacker run a workload in any namespace whose Pod Security Admission level permits it (or that is PSA-exempt, such as kube-system , kyverno) to reach the node filesystem and a control-plane kubeconfig.

This is an incomplete fix of CVE-2025-68476: its content filter only requires the loaded file to be a JWT whose subject begins with system:serviceaccount:, which the operator's own projected token satisfies by construction. The destination field hashiCorpVault.address is unvalidated.

Finder credits: Artem Cherezov @cherez0ff, with Claude Opus 4.8

Verified live

Weakness type: CWE-269, CWE-918.

Product: github.com/kedacore/keda (Go) · Assigned by: GitHub_M · Published: 2026-10-14

Affected and fixed versions

Severity scores

• Attack vector: network (remotely reachable)
• Attack complexity: low
• Privileges required: low (any account)
• User interaction: none
• Scope: changed (can affect other components)

CVSS measures how bad a flaw is if exploited, not how likely exploitation is. Read it next to the exploitation data below.

Exploitation and urgency

• CISA KEV: not listed (no confirmed in-the-wild exploitation known to CISA).
• CISA SSVC assessment: exploitation poc, automatable no, technical impact total.
• FIRST EPSS (model of 2026-10-21): 0.64% probability of exploitation activity in the next 30 days; percentile 50.

Timeline

• 2026-10-14 — CVE record published by GitHub_M
• 2026-10-15 — GitHub-reviewed advisory GHSA-637c-6jxx-4rwm published (critical)
• 2026-10-20 — CVE record last updated

Sources and references

Original sources first. Version and fix details should always be confirmed against the vendor or project advisory.

Vulnerability records

1. GitHub Advisory GHSA-637c-6jxx-4rwm github.com
2. CVE.org record CVE-2026-77524 cve.org
3. NVD entry CVE-2026-77524 nvd.nist.gov

Other references from the CVE record and advisory

1. github.com github.com
2. github.com github.com
3. github.com github.com

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