CVE-2026-44945Critical Privilege Escalation in Rancher
A privilege escalation vulnerability exists in Rancher's impersonation middleware (pkg/auth/requests/impersonate.go). An authenticated Rancher user with the default user global role can gain full administrative access to the Rancher control plane and transitively to all downstream clusters it manages. This issue affects Rancher: from 2.11.0 before 2.11.16, from 2.12.0 before 2.12.12, from 2.13.0 before 2.13.8, and from 2.14.0 before 2.14.2.
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A critical vulnerability in Rancher allows any authenticated user with default permissions to gain full administrative control over the Rancher management plane and all downstream Kubernetes clusters. If you use Rancher to manage your clusters, update to versions 2.11.16, 2.12.12, 2.13.8, or 2.14.2 immediately.
Relevant roles
Severity
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:HCWE-441CWE-497EPSS
No EPSS score yet (CVE may be too fresh).
Technical description
A privilege escalation vulnerability exists in Rancher's impersonation middleware (pkg/auth/requests/impersonate.go). An authenticated Rancher user with the default user global role can gain full administrative access to the Rancher control plane and transitively to all downstream clusters it manages. This issue affects Rancher: from 2.11.0 before 2.11.16, from 2.12.0 before 2.12.12, from 2.13.0 before 2.13.8, and from 2.14.0 before 2.14.2.