CVE-2026-44945 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.1) CWE-441 vulnerability. A fix is available — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Cross-Cluster Impersonation Confused-Deputy Privilege Escalation
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
- 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-2026-44945.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
Description
A privilege escalation vulnerability exists in Rancher's impersonation middleware (pkg/auth/requests/impersonate.go). An authenticated Rancher user with the default user global role can gain full administrative access to the Rancher control plane and transitively to all downstream clusters it manages.
This issue affects Rancher: from 2.11.0 before 2.11.16, from 2.12.0 before 2.12.12, from 2.13.0 before 2.13.8, and from 2.14.0 before 2.14.2.
Detection & mitigation playbook
VulnerabilityDetect
Identify every host running the affected component and compare the installed build against the fixed version below — for source-built or distro-packaged software the version string, not a lockfile, is the source of truth (`dpkg -l`, `rpm -q`, or the binary's own `--version`).
Fix
Upgrade the affected component to the fixed release for CVE-2026-44945, or apply your distribution's backported patch — distro builds are often patched at an older version number, so check your vendor's advisory rather than the upstream version alone.
Workarounds
Close the privilege gap rather than the entry point: audit which accounts, roles and service identities can reach the affected operation, drop the component to the least privilege it actually needs, and review file and directory permissions created by earlier installs — a default left in place is what makes this reachable.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2026-44945 in your dependencies?
Find it across your dependency tree, including transitive dependencies.