What is the CVSS score of CVE-2026-18949?

CVE-2026-18949 has a CVSS 3.1 base score of 8.8 (High). CVSS vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H. EPSS exploitation probability: 0.4%.

Which versions of odh-dashboard are affected by CVE-2026-18949?

A privilege escalation vulnerability in Red Hat OpenShift AI's odh-dashboard allows attackers with a compromised Service Account token to escalate to cluster-administrator access, exposing all…. A patch is available.

How to fix or mitigate CVE-2026-18949?

Within 24 hours, immediately audit odh-dashboard Service Account token distribution and current RBAC assignments; implement least-privilege scoping and rotate all SA tokens if any compromise is suspected. Over the next 7 days, establish comprehensive audit logging and alerting for Service Account token usage and cluster-admin operations, and develop incident response procedures specific to SA token compromise. Within 30 days, architect and deploy enhanced credential management (e.g., workload identity federation), implement network segmentation restricting SA access, and monitor for vendor patch availability for immediate deployment.

odh-dashboard CVE-2026-18949

EUVD-2026-55819 HIGH

Execution with Unnecessary Privileges (CWE-250)

2026-08-10 redhat

GHSA-vccp-8mm3-h2f6

Privilege Escalation Information Disclosure Red Hat Red Hat Openshift Ai Rhoai Red Hat

8.8

CVSS 3.1 · Vendor: redhat

Severity by source

Vendor (redhat) PRIMARY

8.8 HIGH

AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

vuln.today AI

9.9 CRITICAL

S:C (not vendor's S:U) because SA abuse grants cluster-admin access crossing all tenant namespace security boundaries beyond the vulnerable component.

3.1 AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

4.0 AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:H/SI:H/SA:H

Red Hat

8.8 CRITICAL

qualitative

Primary rating from Vendor (redhat).

CVSS VectorVendor: redhat

Attack Vector

Network

Attack Complexity

Low

Privileges Required

Low

User Interaction

None

Scope

Unchanged

Confidentiality

High

Integrity

High

Availability

High

Lifecycle Timeline

Analysis Generated

Aug 10, 2026 - 21:26 vuln.today

CVE Published

Aug 10, 2026 - 20:45 nvd

HIGH 8.8

DescriptionCVE.org

A flaw was found in odh-dashboard. This vulnerability allows an attacker, who has compromised the dashboard's Service Account (SA) token, to exploit overly broad permissions granted to the SA. This enables the attacker to escalate their privileges to cluster-administrator level, gain access to sensitive data like credentials and keys across the entire cluster, and disrupt multi-tenant isolation.

AnalysisAI

Privilege escalation in odh-dashboard (Red Hat OpenShift AI) allows an attacker who has obtained the dashboard's Service Account token to abuse overly broad SA permissions and elevate to cluster-administrator level. Exploitation grants full access to secrets, credentials, and keys across the entire OpenShift cluster, while also breaking multi-tenant isolation between workloads. No public exploit code has been identified at time of analysis, and this CVE is not in CISA KEV, but the CVSS score of 8.8 and cluster-wide blast radius make it a high-priority remediation target for RHOAI deployments.

Technical ContextAI

The vulnerability resides in odh-dashboard, the web-based interface component of Red Hat OpenShift AI (RHOAI), identified by CPE cpe:2.3:a:red_hat:red_hat_openshift_ai_(rhoai). OpenShift AI deploys Kubernetes Service Accounts to allow dashboard pods to interact with the cluster API. CWE-250 (Execution with Unnecessary Privileges) is the root cause: the SA bound to the odh-dashboard pod has been granted permissions far exceeding what the dashboard legitimately requires - effectively cluster-admin-equivalent ClusterRole bindings or wildcard RBAC rules. An attacker who obtains this token (via pod compromise, token exfiltration from a mounted secret, or API server exposure) can then make direct Kubernetes API calls using the SA's JWT, which the API server honors with elevated privilege. This is a Kubernetes RBAC misconfiguration class of vulnerability, not a code-execution flaw in the dashboard itself.

RemediationAI

The primary remediation is to apply the vendor-supplied patch from Red Hat once available; consult https://access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2026-18949 for the exact fixed RHOAI operator version, as a specific patched release version is not confirmed from available input data. Upstream fix status should be tracked via https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2511168. As an immediate compensating control, administrators should audit and tighten the ClusterRole or ClusterRoleBinding associated with the odh-dashboard Service Account, removing any wildcard rules (verbs: ['*'] or resources: ['*']) and restricting permissions to the minimum set required for dashboard operation - this directly addresses the CWE-250 root cause. Additionally, consider enabling Kubernetes audit logging focused on SA token usage for the odh-dashboard SA to detect anomalous API calls. Rotating the existing SA token after hardening the RBAC policy will invalidate any token already in an attacker's possession. Note that overly restrictive RBAC on the SA may break dashboard features that rely on cluster-wide reads; validate against your RHOAI feature set after applying restrictions.