The vulnerability exists in the search-v2-operator component of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2.11. A user with patch managedclusteraddons permission on a managed cluster can manipulate the addon.open-cluster-management.io/values annotation on a ManagedClusterAddOn to override Helm values arbitrarily. This allows the attacker to replace container images, resulting in container image injection, privilege escalation, and arbitrary code execution on the managed cluster. The flaw is categorized under CWE-915 (Improperly Controlled Modification of Dynamically-Determined Object Attributes).

An attacker with specific administrative permissions can inject arbitrary container images into the managed cluster, potentially compromising cluster integrity. This leads to privilege escalation and arbitrary code execution within the managed cluster environment. The confidentiality impact is high, integrity impact is low, and availability impact is none according to the CVSS vector. There are no known exploits in the wild at this time.

Currently, no mitigation or patch is available that meets Red Hat Product Security criteria for ease of use, deployment, applicability, or stability. Users should monitor Red Hat advisories for updates. Until a fix is provided, restricting patch managedclusteraddons permissions to trusted administrators is recommended to reduce risk.