Vulnerability details

CVE-2026-44882

portainer portainer

Portainer: Kubernetes middleware continues after token validation failure, bypassing endpoint authorization

CVSS 3.1
8.1High

Official description

Portainer Community Edition is a lightweight service delivery platform for containerized applications that can be used to manage Docker, Swarm, Kubernetes and ACI environments. From 2.33.0 to before 2.33., Portainer proxies requests to Kubernetes clusters through a middleware layer (kubeClientMiddleware) that validates the requesting user's token before forwarding traffic to the cluster. When security.RetrieveTokenData returned an error, the middleware wrote an HTTP 403 response but was missing a return statement — execution continued into the handler with a nil tokenData value. The Kubernetes endpoints sit behind Portainer's outer AuthenticatedAccess bouncer, so an attacker requires a valid Portainer session. However, a user whose secondary token validation fails in kubeClientMiddleware — for example a user without permission to access a given Kubernetes endpoint — would have their request forwarded to the cluster anyway, bypassing the authorization check. The same defect was present in both the CE and EE codebases. This vulnerability is fixed in 2.33.8.

CVSS scores

ScoreVersionSourceVector
8.1High 3.1 CVEProject cvelistV5 (CNA) (GitHub_M) CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N

Affected products

VendorProductVersionsSource
portainer portainer >= 2.33.0, < 2.33.8 CVEProject cvelistV5 (CNA)

References and advisories

1
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Details

Published
2026-05-29
Last updated
2026-05-30
State
Published
Assigner (CNA)
GitHub_M

Exploit prediction (EPSS)

0.33%
Probability of exploitation in 30 days
27%
Percentile (among all CVEs)

SSVC assessment (CISA)

Automatable
No
Exploitation
None
Technical impact
Total

Weaknesses (CWE)

  • CWE-863
    Incorrect Authorization