A critical vulnerability in Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes (RHACM) could let a low-privileged tenant on a central hub cluster seize administrative control of any Kubernetes cluster it manages, according to Red Hat’s own advisory on the flaw.
An Unvalidated Annotation Opens the Door
Tracked as CVE-2026-72526 and carrying a CVSS score of 9.9, the flaw sits in the multicloud-integrations component that RHACM uses to propagate applications from a central hub cluster to the individual managed, or “spoke,” clusters it oversees. The Application propagation controller processes an ocm-managed-cluster annotation on an Application custom resource without properly validating it, which means a tenant who only has permission to create Applications on the hub can direct that annotation at any managed cluster of their choosing, not just their own. Doing so forces ArgoCD on the targeted spoke cluster to synchronize manifests the attacker controls, resulting in arbitrary code execution or privilege escalation on a cluster the tenant was never authorized to touch.
A Direct Route From Low Privilege to Cluster-Admin
Because the underlying authorization check is missing entirely rather than merely weak, the flaw gives a low-privileged hub tenant a direct path to cluster-admin rights on infrastructure well outside their own environment, a significant multi-tenant isolation failure for organizations running shared RHACM hubs across business units or customers. Red Hat has published fixed component versions in its advisory and accompanying Bugzilla report; organizations running RHACM are advised to apply the update and confirm that the propagation controller correctly enforces tenant-scoped cluster authorization after upgrading, alongside reviewing who currently holds Application-creation permissions on their hub clusters.








