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MEDIUM severity

CVE-2026-22728 — sealed-secrets

MEDIUMFix: bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets@d57ee4a

CVE-2026-22728 is a medium-severity (CVSS 4.9) CWE-284 vulnerability in github.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets. A fix is available for github.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets — see the affected versions and patch details below.

sealed-secrets /v1/rotate can widen sealing scope to cluster-wide via attacker-controlled template annotations

Also known asBIT-sealed-secrets-2026-22728GHSA-465p-v42x-3fmjGO-2026-4565
Published
Updated
Affected
1 pkg
Patched
1 / 1
Exploits
None indexed
Exploitation data as of Nov 1, 2026 · OSV.dev, NVD, FIRST.org (EPSS)

Exploitation Status

No confirmed exploitation observed yet

  • CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.

Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2026-22728.

EPSS Exploitation Probability

via FIRST.org ↗
0.4%probability of exploitation in next 30 days
Lower Risk+0.04%
Lower risk than most CVEs35th percentile — riskier than 35% of all scored CVEsHighest risk
0.00%0.30%0.61%0.91%0.1%0.4%May 26Aug 26Nov 26

Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.

How urgent is this, really

Where this sits among everything scored

Real-World Exposure

1 pkg affected
🐹github.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets

Real-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects Go packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.

Description

This report shows a scope-widening issue in the rotate (re-encrypt) flow: the output scope can be derived from untrusted spec.template.metadata.annotations on the input sealed secret.

If a victim sealed secret is strict- or namespace-scoped, an attacker who can submit it to the rotate endpoint can set sealedsecrets.bitnami.com/cluster-wide=true in the template metadata and receive a rotated sealed secret that is cluster-wide, enabling retargeting (metadata.name/metadata.namespace) and unsealing to recover the victim plaintext.

Relevant Links (Pinned)

Root Cause

The rotate flow unseals the input sealed secret to a Secret, then reseals using NewSealedSecret(..., secret).

Because SecretScope(secret) is computed from secret annotations, and unsealing applies spec.template metadata onto the unsealed secret, an attacker can influence the scope of the rotated output by mutating template annotations on the rotate input.

Attack Path

  1. Attacker obtains a victim SealedSecret object (for example via read access to resources or logs) and can submit it to the controller rotate endpoint.
  2. Attacker sets spec.template.metadata.annotations.sealedsecrets.bitnami.com/cluster-wide=true (and optionally retargets name/namespace fields).
  3. Rotate returns a resealed, cluster-wide sealed secret that is no longer bound to the victim name/namespace.
  4. Attacker unseals the rotated output in their chosen namespace/name to recover the victim plaintext.

Proof of Concept

Setup + run:

unzip poc.zip -d poc
cd poc
make test

Canonical output (excerpt):

[CALLSITE_HIT]: pkg/apis/sealedsecrets/v1alpha1/sealedsecret_expansion.go:112 SecretScope
[PROOF_MARKER]: scope_widened=true rotated_scope=cluster-wide

Control output (excerpt):

[NC_MARKER]: scope_widened=false strict_scope_preserved=true

Fix Accepted When

Rotate preserves the original sealing scope and does not allow scope widening based on untrusted template metadata; strict or namespace-wide inputs cannot produce cluster-wide outputs.

poc.zip PR_DESCRIPTION.md attack_scenario.md

Affected Packages

1 total 1 fixed
EcosystemPackageVulnerable rangeFix
🐹Gogithub.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secretsall versions0.36.0go get github.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets@v0.36.0

Detection & mitigation playbook

Open-source dependency

  1. Detect

    Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for github.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.

  2. Fix

    Update github.com/bitnami-labs/sealed-secrets to 0.36.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2026-22728 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.

  3. Workarounds

    Put an independent control in front of the weakness: restrict the affected endpoint or interface to trusted networks, require an additional authentication factor or proxy-level check, and invalidate existing sessions and credentials in case the flaw has already been used.

Frequently Asked Questions

This report shows a scope-widening issue in the rotate (re-encrypt) flow: the output scope can be derived from untrusted `spec.template.metadata.annotations` on the input sealed secret. If a victim sealed secret is strict- or namespace-scoped, an attacker who can submit it to the rotate endpoint can set `sealedsecrets.bitnami.com/cluster-wide=true` in the template metadata and receive a rotated sealed secret that is cluster-wide, enabling retargeting (`metadata.name`/`metadata.namespace`) and unsealing to recover the victim plaintext. ## Relevant Links (Pinned) - Rotate handler uses `NewSea
O3 Security · Impact-Aware SCA

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CVE-2026-22728: sealed-secrets — Fixed in 0.36.0