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CVE-2026-53487

CVE-2026-53487: Kite has an authenticated cluster RBAC bypass in /api/v1/overview

Summary

Authenticated Kite users with any role can request /api/v1/overview for a cluster that their roles do not permit by selecting that cluster with x-cluster-name. The overview route is registered before middleware.RBACMiddleware() and GetOverview only checks len(user.Roles) > 0, so it returns aggregate Kubernetes inventory and capacity data from unauthorized clusters.

The issue is present on current main commit 38c9bb9d4b746c0d2a8252f3c35cdfa07ab01c21 and latest release v0.12.2 at commit 0aae35abb2d6a8adf623fe60349261aa48753ccc.

Impact

A low-privileged user who only has access to one cluster can set x-cluster-name to another configured cluster and retrieve aggregate inventory and resource sizing data for that cluster. The response includes total node, pod, namespace, service, CPU, and memory values. This bypasses the cluster membership boundary used elsewhere in Kite.

The validated impact is confidentiality only. I did not prove Kubernetes mutation, pod names, secret values, kubeconfig contents, or bearer token exposure through this endpoint.

Technical details

routes.go registers /api/v1/overview before the global RBAC middleware is applied:

routes.go:131-133: /api/v1 gets RequireAuth() and ClusterMiddleware(cm).
routes.go:135: /api/v1/overview is registered.
routes.go:171: api.Use(middleware.RBACMiddleware()) is applied only after overview and several other routes are registered.

pkg/middleware/cluster.go:21-40 accepts the target cluster name from x-cluster-name, query, or cookie and injects the matching ClientSet without checking whether the user can access that cluster.

retrieves the selected cluster and user, but only rejects users with zero roles:

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CVE-2026-53487

CVE-2026-53487:

4.3

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Technical Details

Package Name	Ecosystem	Vulnerable Versions	First Patched Version
github.com/zxh326/kite	go	<= 0.12.2	0.12.3

Technical Details

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Root Cause Analysis

The vulnerability, identified as GHSA-gvhc-wv3v-7pf8, is an RBAC bypass in Kite's API. The root cause was that several API endpoints, including /api/v1/overview, were registered before the main RBAC middleware was applied. The handlers for these endpoints failed to perform their own authorization checks to verify if the authenticated user had access to the cluster specified in the x-cluster-name header.

The analysis of the patch commit d315a0ef46ba0db744160bccba6225930db17ed7 confirms this. The primary vulnerable function, GetOverview in pkg/system/handler.go, was modified to replace a weak check for the existence of any user role (len(user.Roles) > 0) with a proper authorization check using rbac.CanAccessCluster(user, cs.Name). This change ensures that the user's permissions for the specific target cluster are verified.

The same patch also applied identical fixes to other functions (GetResourceUsageHistory, GetPodMetrics in pkg/metrics/handler.go, and GlobalSearch in pkg/search/handler.go), which were presumably also unprotected and vulnerable to the same RBAC bypass. Therefore, these functions would also appear in a runtime profile during exploitation.

Vulnerable functions

GetOverview

pkg/system/handler.go

The function `GetOverview` in `pkg/system/handler.go` was vulnerable because it only checked if a user had any roles (`len(user.Roles) > 0`) instead of verifying if the user was authorized to access the specific cluster requested via the `x-cluster-name` header. This allowed any authenticated user to bypass RBAC and retrieve overview data from any cluster.

GetResourceUsageHistory

pkg/metrics/handler.go

The function `GetResourceUsageHistory` in `pkg/metrics/handler.go` was missing an authorization check. The patch added a call to `rbac.CanAccessCluster` to ensure the user has access to the cluster before returning resource usage history, indicating it was previously vulnerable to the same RBAC bypass as `GetOverview`.

GetPodMetrics

pkg/metrics/handler.go

Similar to `GetResourceUsageHistory`, the `GetPodMetrics` function in `pkg/metrics/handler.go` lacked a cluster access check. The patch introduced the `rbac.CanAccessCluster` check, which confirms that this function was also vulnerable to the RBAC bypass, allowing unauthorized users to access pod metrics.

GlobalSearch

pkg/search/handler.go

The `GlobalSearch` function in `pkg/search/handler.go` was vulnerable as it did not perform an RBAC check for cluster access before executing a search. The patch added a call to `rbac.CanAccessCluster` at the beginning of the function, preventing unauthorized users from performing global searches on clusters they do not have access to.

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WAF Rule

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Reasoning

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CVE-2026-53487: Kite has an authenticated cluster RBAC bypass in /api/v1/overview

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CVE-2026-53487: Kite has an authenticated cluster RBAC bypass in /api/v1/overview

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CVE-2026-53487: Kite has an authenticated cluster RBAC bypass in /api/v1/overview

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CVE-2026-53487: Kite has an authenticated cluster RBAC bypass in /api/v1/overview

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