SUSE Rancher Manager CVE-2026-104623

Requires only an authenticated Rancher account reaching the local (management) cluster shell endpoint - including a user with the default user global role and no role bindings on the local cluster and no administrative privileges. Deployments in a DEFAULT configuration are affected; no non-default feature flag or setting must be enabled. Exploitation uses an alternative API request form that reaches the shell handler without the authorization check being evaluated. The one limiting factor is that the attacker must already hold a valid authenticated Rancher account (PR:L), so exposure scales with the number and governance of Rancher users; it is not reachable by fully unauthenticated attackers.

This is a moderate-severity authorization bypass (CVSS 6.3, CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:L) in SUSE Rancher Manager's local (management) cluster shell feature, and the signals point to a real but bounded priority rather than an emergency. The vuln.today decision label is 'this_month' (not act_now/emergency), consistent with the moderate impact. No CISA KEV listing and no EPSS score were supplied, and there is no public exploit identified at time of analysis - so there is no evidence of active or at-scale exploitation. The CVSS vector is internally consistent with the GHSA description: AV:N/AC:L (reachable over the network via an alternative API request form that evades the access check, no special conditions) and PR:L (any authenticated Rancher user suffices, including a default user global role with no local cluster bindings). The Low C/I/A impacts align with the vendor's own framing: the spawned pod is unprivileged and its Kubernetes API access stays scoped to the requesting user's identity, so it grants no additional Kubernetes permissions - the harm is an isolation break (unauthorized compute and an in-namespace network position in cattle-system on the management plane). One metadata conflict to flag: the input Tags/NVD-style CWE label this 'Authentication Bypass' (CWE-290), but the authoritative GHSA classifies it as missing/incorrect authorization (CWE-862/CWE-863) and explicitly requires an authenticated account - this is an authorization bypass, not an authentication bypass. The practical priority driver is population size: any authenticated account, however low-privileged, can reach the management cluster, so environments with many or loosely-governed Rancher users carry meaningfully more risk.

A low-privileged user who holds only a default Rancher account (no local cluster roles) sends the shell request in an alternative API form that the added authorization check never evaluates, and receives an interactive shell pod in the cattle-system namespace of the management cluster. Because AV:N/AC:L/PR:L and the default configuration is affected, no user interaction, special privileges, or non-default settings are needed beyond a valid login. No public exploit code was identified at time of analysis.