CVE-2026-44945 (CVSS 9.1)

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.

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CVSS v3.1 Score

9.1

CRITICAL

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

EPSS — Exploit Prediction

0.0038

Probability of exploitation

0.31%

Percentile rank

EPSS estimates the probability that this vulnerability will be exploited in the wild within the next 30 days. A higher score means more likely to be exploited.

Weakness Type (CWE)

CWE-441 CWE-441

CWE-497 CWE-497

References

Other References

https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2026-44945 https://github.com/rancher/rancher/pull/55983 https://github.com/rancher/rancher/security/advisories/GHSA-v584-7w32-jwpq

Frequently Asked Questions

What is CVE-2026-44945? +

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. It has a CVSS v3.1 base score of 9.1 (CRITICAL).

How severe is CVE-2026-44945? +

CVE-2026-44945 has a CVSS v3.1 score of 9.1 out of 10, rated CRITICAL. This is a critical vulnerability that should be patched immediately. The EPSS score is 0.0038, placing it in the 0th percentile for exploitation probability.

How do I check if I'm vulnerable to CVE-2026-44945? +

You can use Secably's free Website Scanner to check your website for known vulnerabilities. For infrastructure scanning, use the Port Scanner to identify exposed services that may be affected. Check the vendor advisories linked above for specific patch and version information.

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