CVE-2026-44945 CRITICAL

CVE-2026-44945: Cross-Cluster Impersonation Confused-Deputy Privilege Escalation

Vendor Suse
Product Rancher
Weakness CWE-441
Published August 5, 2026
Last update August 5, 2026

CVSS base score

9.1/10
Attack vector Network
Attack complexity Low
Privileges required High
User interaction None
Confidentiality High
Integrity High

CVSS vector

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

What the vulnerability does

01Description

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.

Key dates

02Disclosure timeline

August 5, 2026 CVE published
August 5, 2026 Record updated