Talos Linux: talosctl support bundles include unredacted private registry credentials

Impact

Before 1.12.9 and 1.13.3, the bundle produced by talosctl support carries the auth field from registryconfigs.cri.talos.dev and sensitive content from etcfilespecs.files.talos.dev verbatim instead of redacting them. Support bundles are exactly the artifact an operator hands to a vendor or attaches to a ticket when a GPU node misbehaves, so the credentials for the registry that serves the cluster's CUDA and model images can leave the organisation without anyone noticing. How bad that is depends on whether the registry is reachable from outside and whether the credential can push as well as pull - a push-capable credential puts image contents for the whole fleet in play. Talos 1.14 and later encrypt bundles by default, which narrows the exposure but does not redact the fields.

Who can reach it

No attack on the cluster is needed. Anyone who receives a support bundle generated by an operator - a vendor, a ticket system, a shared drive - can read the credentials it contains.

What to do

Upgrade to Talos 1.12.9 or 1.13.3, which is a rolling node upgrade and reboot across the cluster. Independently of the upgrade, treat credentials in any bundle already shared as disclosed and rotate the affected registry credentials; auditing which bundles went where is the slower part of this.

References

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