CVE-2026-44945: A privilege escalation vulnerability exists in Rancher's impersonation middleware (pkg/auth/requests/impersona

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CRITICAL 9.1

CVE-2026-44945 is a critical-severity flaw (CVSS 9.1) affecting affected software. Below: why it ranks where it does, which versions are affected, what to do, and the exact commands.

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.

Why this priority

Critical severity

A fixed release or distro patch exists.

Risk facts

CVSS score	9.1 (Critical)
Attack vector	Network (remote)
Attack complexity	Low
Privileges needed	High
User interaction	None
EPSS exploit chance	0.6% (top 54%)
CISA exploited list	No
Weakness	CWE-441, CWE-497
Published	2026-08-05
Last modified	2026-10-23

Publisher (CNA): SUSE

Timeline

2026-08-05 10:17 UTCPublished CVE record published
2026-10-23 21:10 UTCUpdated Record last modified

Exact fixes by distribution

Fedora 46 · kwin-zones · FIXED · 1.0.13-1.fc46 · FEDORA-2026-95888f332b · source

sudo dnf upgrade --advisory=FEDORA-2026-95888f332b

Fedora ELN · nginx-mod-brotli · FIXED · 1.0.0~rc-16.eln159 · FEDORA-2026-501a6a8273 · source

sudo dnf upgrade --advisory=FEDORA-2026-501a6a8273

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Scores and fixes here are computed automatically from those and other public sources. Confirm with the vendor advisory before changing production systems.

References

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