CVE-2026-59341: Sealed Secrets: decryption oracle via Go template injection in unauthenticated controller endpoints

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2026-59341 is a medium (CVSS 4.2) Observable Discrepancy vulnerability in bitnami sealed-secrets. EPSS estimates a 0.40% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 34.6% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 15-09-2026
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 16-09-2026
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

A security vulnerability exists in the Sealed Secrets controller's unauthenticated POST endpoints. By submitting a modified payload containing custom Go template logic in spec.template.data, an attacker with internal network access can abuse the handler as a decryption oracle to recover the full plaintext of any sealed secret. The POST /v1/verify and /v1/rotate handlers call Unseal() to decrypt target secrets, then render any Go templates found in spec.template.data.* using the decrypted payload as the evaluation context (pkg/apis/sealedsecrets/v1alpha1/sealedsecret_expansion.go). Errors encountered during template execution are directly reflected in the resulting HTTP response status codes. Missing AEAD label binding: the spec.template.data field is omitted from the AEAD authenticated-data label binding ciphertext to metadata. As a result, an attacker can copy a target's valid metadata and encryptedData verbatim, satisfying AEAD decryption and label validation, while freely replacing spec.template.data with arbitrary template logic. Side-channel oracle: template execution errors map directly to HTTP response codes. HTTP 200 (OK) indicates template execution succeeded; HTTP 409 (Conflict) indicates template execution failed (e.g. via {{ fail "..." }}). By injecting conditional statements such as {{ if eq (substr 0 1 .password) "S" }}ok{{ else }}{{ fail "x" }}{{ end }}, an attacker receives an HTTP 200 status when a character guess is correct and an HTTP 409 when it is incorrect. This differential response leaks one character-equality bit per request, allowing full secret extraction over successive queries. Attack vector & prerequisites: unauthenticated; requires network access to the controller's internal service port (:8080). Although this service is not exposed to the public internet by default, it is accessible to any pod within the Kubernetes cluster or via a kubectl port-forward connection.

• CWE-203Observable DiscrepancyThe product behaves differently or sends different responses under different circumstances in a way that is observable to an unauthorized actor.