Definition. A confused deputy is a program with far-reaching privileges that carries out a request from someone with fewer privileges and uses its own privileges in doing so. Norm Hardy coined the term in 1988 in his paper “The Confused Deputy”.

Why it matters. In Kubernetes, operators and controllers are typical deputies. They read resources from tenant namespaces and act with cluster-wide privileges. If they take targets or paths from those resources without checking them, a tenant can turn them against the cluster.

Example. With CVE-2026-77524, the KEDA operator sent its own ServiceAccount token to a Vault server that a tenant had specified in a TriggerAuthentication.

Related. Kubernetes, CVE, Local Privilege Escalation (LPE)