High severity · published Sep 27, 2026
CVE-2025-71426
Contrast before 1.4.1 Coordinator Impersonation via Unauthenticated Recovery
7.1
CVSS
0.1%
EPSS
No
On KEV
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.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:L/I:H/A:N
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
Required
Confidentiality
Low
Integrity
High
Availability
None
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.1% · higher than 3% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
CO
contrast · edgelesssys
before 1.4.1 · source: vendor
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-71426
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-71426
vendor-advisory
https://github.com/edgelesssys/contrast/security/advisories/GHSA-vqv5-385r-2hf8
third-party-advisory
https://www.vulncheck.com/advisories/contrast-before-1.4.1-coordinator-impersonation-via-unauthenticated-recovery
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