Generated remediation guidance and an executive summary. No account required.
External Secrets Operator is a Kubernetes operator that integrates external secret management systems. The external-secrets has a deployment called default-external-secrets-cert-controller, which is bound with a same-name ClusterRole. This ClusterRole has "get/list" verbs of secrets resources. It also has path/update verb of validatingwebhookconfigurations resources. This can be used to abuse the SA token of the deployment to retrieve or get ALL secrets in the whole cluster, capture and log all data from requests attempting to update Secrets, or make a webhook deny all Pod create and update requests. This vulnerability is fixed in 0.10.2.
Use CWE-269, External-Secrets vendor hub and External Secrets Operator product page to widen CVE-2024-45041 into its surrounding weakness, vendor, and product context.
Compare it with CVE-2024-36540, CVE-2026-22822 and CVE-2026-34984 for nearby disclosures in the same product family.