Privilege Escalation via virt-handler Service Account in KubeVirt

CVE-2023-26484 · HIGH Severity

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

KubeVirt is a virtual machine management add-on for Kubernetes. In versions 0.59.0 and prior, if a malicious user has taken over a Kubernetes node where virt-handler (the KubeVirt node-daemon) is running, the virt-handler service account can be used to modify all node specs. This can be misused to lure-in system-level-privileged components which can, for instance, read all secrets on the cluster, or can exec into pods on other nodes. This way, a compromised node can be used to elevate privileges beyond the node until potentially having full privileged access to the whole cluster. The simplest way to exploit this, once a user could compromise a specific node, is to set with the virt-handler service account all other nodes to unschedulable and simply wait until system-critical components with high privileges appear on its node. No patches are available as of time of publication. As a workaround, gatekeeper users can add a webhook which will block the `virt-handler` service account to modify the spec of a node.

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