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

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