Impact

What kind of vulnerability is it? Who is impacted?

Both in karmadactl and karmada-operator, it is possible to supply a filesystem path, or an HTTP(s) URL to retrieve the custom resource definitions(CRDs) needed by karmada. The CRDs are downloaded as a gzipped tarfile and are vulnerable to a TarSlip vulnerability. An attacker able to supply a malicious CRD file into a karmada initialization could write arbitrary files in arbitrary paths of the filesystem.

Patches

Has the problem been patched? What versions should users upgrade to?

From karmada version v1.12.0, when processing custom CRDs files, CRDs archive verification is utilized to enhance file system robustness.

Workarounds

Is there a way for users to fix or remediate the vulnerability without upgrading?

When using karmadactl init to set up Karmada, if you need to set flag --crd to customize the CRD files required for karmada initialization, you can manually inspect the CRD files to check whether they contain sequences such as ../ that would alter file paths, to determine if they potentially include malicious files.

When using karmada-operator to set up Karmada, you must upgrade your karmada-operator to one of the fixed versions.

References

Are there any links users can visit to find out more?

1. Enhancements made from the Karmada community: #5713, #5703