CVE-2026-77524 CRITICAL

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

Vendor Kedacore
Product keda
Weakness CWE-269
Published October 14, 2026
Last update October 20, 2026

CVSS base score

9.9/10
Attack vector Network
Attack complexity Low
Privileges required Low
User interaction None
Confidentiality High
Integrity High

CVSS vector

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

What the vulnerability does

01Description

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.

Key dates

02Disclosure timeline

October 14, 2026 CVE published
October 20, 2026 Record updated

Related vulnerabilities

04Related CVE