Disclosure summary
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.
Source-reported weakness categories
CWE-285
Source-specific records & product guidance
Sources retain their own attribution and scoring. Follow the original record to confirm affected versions, fixed releases, and configuration conditions.
NIST National Vulnerability Database · NVD-CVE-2025-71426
Open original source · Updated Oct 08, 2026
Only CPE matches marked vulnerable=true are indexed. AND/OR platform conditions must be checked in the original NVD record.
Original records & references
PUBLISHED 2026-09-26T22:17:17-04:00
MODIFIED 2026-10-08T12:16:54-04:00
INGESTED 2026-10-10T20:50:44-04:00