CVE-2025-71426

Contrast before 1.4.1 Coordinator Impersonation via Unauthenticated Recovery

HIGH
7.1
CVSS Score
Published: September 27, 2026 at 01:28 AM UTC
Updated: October 14, 2026 at 01:10 PM UTC
1 product affected across 1 vendorContrast

Using contrast by edgelesssys?

Get instant alerts when new vulnerabilities affect contrast - before attackers find them.

Real-time alertsTrack your software stackFree plan available
Severity
HIGH7.1
Exploit prediction
EPSS 0.1%
SSVC
No known exploit

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

Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.

0 ≤ v < 1.4.10
Vendor states this is fixed in 1.4.1 (unaffected)

Remediation

No guide yet

No remediation guidance has been written for this CVE yet. What the record does show:

SSVC — Action Prioritization

SSVCNo known exploitNot automatablePartial impact

SSVC signals action urgency (what to patch first), separate from CVSS which measures severity.

CVSS

7.1HIGHVulnCheck
Vector?

Quick Info

StatusDEFERRED
CWE
CWE-285

Get alerted

Stop reading CVE feeds looking for your own stack

Track the products you run and VulnTracker tells you when a new CVE affects them — with what is known about fixing it, and nothing about the rest.

Free plan, no card