A flaw was found in the Application Subscription controller (multicluster-operators-subscription) of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes (ACM). A user with namespace-scoped "edit" privileges in an ACM hub namespace can create a Channel resource pointing to a Helm repository they control and a Subscription resource referencing it. The app-subscription controller fetches and applies the Helm chart contents with its own elevated authority, without verifying whether the subscription creator holds the "open-cluster-management:subscription-admin" role and without restricting applied resources to the subscription namespace. This allows the attacker to include cluster-scoped resources in the Helm chart, such as a ClusterRoleBinding granting the attacker's ServiceAccount the "cluster-admin" ClusterRole. Successful exploitation results in full cluster-admin privilege escalation. This contradicts the ACM documentation which states that non-subscription-admin users should have resources deployed into the subscription namespace only.
History

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 14:30:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Metrics ssvc

{'options': {'Automatable': 'no', 'Exploitation': 'none', 'Technical Impact': 'total'}, 'version': '2.0.3'}


Wed, 05 Aug 2026 12:15:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
References
Metrics threat_severity

None

threat_severity

Important


Wed, 05 Aug 2026 09:15:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Description A flaw was found in the Application Subscription controller (multicluster-operators-subscription) of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes (ACM). A user with namespace-scoped "edit" privileges in an ACM hub namespace can create a Channel resource pointing to a Helm repository they control and a Subscription resource referencing it. The app-subscription controller fetches and applies the Helm chart contents with its own elevated authority, without verifying whether the subscription creator holds the "open-cluster-management:subscription-admin" role and without restricting applied resources to the subscription namespace. This allows the attacker to include cluster-scoped resources in the Helm chart, such as a ClusterRoleBinding granting the attacker's ServiceAccount the "cluster-admin" ClusterRole. Successful exploitation results in full cluster-admin privilege escalation. This contradicts the ACM documentation which states that non-subscription-admin users should have resources deployed into the subscription namespace only.
Title Multicluster-operators-subscription: multicluster-operators-subscription: namespace edit user can deploy cluster-scoped clusterrolebinding and become cluster-admin via application subscription
First Time appeared Redhat
Redhat acm
Weaknesses CWE-267
CPEs cpe:/a:redhat:acm:2
Vendors & Products Redhat
Redhat acm
References
Metrics cvssV3_1

{'score': 9.9, 'vector': 'CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H'}


cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: redhat

Published: 2026-08-05T08:54:55.719Z

Updated: 2026-08-05T13:50:30.171Z

Reserved: 2026-05-29T13:35:58.652Z

Link: CVE-2026-10090

cve-icon Vulnrichment

Updated: 2026-08-05T13:49:48.556Z

cve-icon NVD

No data.

cve-icon Redhat

Severity : Important

Publid Date: 2026-08-05T08:35:00Z

Links: CVE-2026-10090 - Bugzilla