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HIGH

Contrast before 1.4.1 Coordinator Impersonation via Unauthenticated Recovery

Published Sep 27, 2026

Description

Contrast is a confidential-computing runtime for Kubernetes. In versions before 1.4.1, a recovering Coordinator does not verify the seed supplied by the recovering party. An attacker can therefore stand up a rogue Coordinator whose manifest passes validation but whose secret seed is attacker-controlled. If network traffic is redirected from the legitimate Coordinator to the attacker's Coordinator, a workload owner can be impersonated when they either set a new manifest without comparing the returned root CA certificate against the existing one (the default behavior of the contrast CLI) or verify the Coordinator without comparing the root CA certificate against a trusted reference. Under these conditions the attacker can issue certificates that chain back to the rogue Coordinator's root CA and recover arbitrary workload secrets of workloads deployed after the attack. Secrets of the legitimate Coordinator (seed, workload secrets, CA), workload integrity, and certificates chaining to the mesh CA are not affected.

Affected products

Remediation

No remediation recorded yet.

Metrics

Weaknesses (1)

References (2)

Change history (0)

No recorded changes yet.

Sources
CVE.org / MITRE
Status PUBLISHED
Assigner VulnCheck
Published Sep 27, 2026
Updated Sep 30, 2026
Reserved Sep 27, 2026
CISA Vulnrichment
Updated Sep 30, 2026
NVD
Status Received
Modified Sep 27, 2026
Red Hat
Severity n/a
Public date n/a