CVE-2026-11769: Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory

We have released version 5.24.0 of the Grafana Operator. This patch includes a MEDIUM severity security fix for a path traversal/privilege escalation vulnerability in the Grafana Operator.

### Summary

The Grafana Operator supports loading dashboards & library panels using the jsonnet data templating language. The jsonnet expression is evaluated in the context of the operator manager pod.

### Impact

It is possible for a malicious user who can create Dashboard or LibraryPanel resources for a Grafana instance to obtain the Kubernetes service account token of the Grafana Operator manager.

### Affected versions

All Grafana Operator versions <= 5.23

### Solutions and mitigations

All installations should be upgraded as soon as possible.

As a workaround, the following ValidatingAdmissionPolicy prevent the creation or modification of jsonnet based resources:

apiVersion: admissionregistration.k8s.io/v1 kind: ValidatingAdmissionPolicy metadata: name: "prevent-jsonnet-dashboards" spec: failurePolicy: Fail matchConstraints: resourceRules: - apiGroups: ["grafana.integreatly.org"] apiVersions: ["v1beta1"] operations: ["CREATE", "UPDATE"] resources: ["grafanadashboards", "grafanalibrarypanels"] validations: - expression: "!has(object.spec.jsonnetLib)" --- apiVersion: admissionregistration.k8s.io/v1 kind: ValidatingAdmissionPolicyBinding metadata: name: "prevent-jsonnet-dashboards-clusterwide" spec: policyName: "prevent-jsonnet-dashboards" validationActions: [Deny]

### Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Artem Cherezov for responsibly disclosing the vulnerability.