Renovate (kustomize manager): chart names are injected into helm pull commands, running attacker shell commands

Impact

The kustomize manager appends user-provided chart names to helm pull commands without sanitizing them, so a crafted kustomization.yaml executes arbitrary commands on the Renovate host. Same practical consequence as the helmv3 injection tracked as CVE-2026-76232 and fixed in the same release: the bot host holds the Git and registry credentials for every repository it manages, which makes it a pivot into the GitOps repositories that describe cluster and node state. Affected from 39.218.0 up to 40.33.0, a much narrower window than the helmv3 issue, so recent-but-not-current self-hosted deployments are the ones at risk.

Who can reach it

An attacker with write access to a repository Renovate scans, via a malicious kustomization.yaml picked up on the bot's normal run. No Renovate credentials required.

What to do

Upgrade Renovate to 40.33.0 or later — the same release that fixes the helmv3 injection, so a single version bump covers both. For self-hosted runs this is an image or package update plus a restart of the bot; nothing at the node level. Rotate credentials held by the Renovate host if you have reason to think it processed attacker-controlled kustomize files.

References