CVE-2026-42016: JFrog Artifactory checks a token's signature but not its scope

01

What the vulnerability does

JFrog's advisory describes it as a privilege escalation in self-hosted Artifactory: when Artifactory validated a token, it checked the signature and issuer and not the token's scope. A token issued for a narrow purpose could be used for more than it was issued for.

CISA added CVE-2026-42016 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 11 September 2026. Wiz reports it being chained with CVE-2026-42018: an unauthenticated request to /access/api/v1/aws/token/ returns a token for Artifactory's internal anonymous user, and a POST to /access/api/v1/tokens exchanges that token for an admin-scoped one. Wiz then reports attackers creating admin accounts, installing Groovy plugins, running shell commands through the plugin endpoint and dropping binaries into /tmp, /var/tmp or /dev/shm.

02

Affected and fixed versions

From JFrog's security advisories page. JFrog says cloud environments are already fixed and need no action; self-hosted instances need the upgrade.

• Affected: Artifactory < 7.133.11.
• Patched: 7.133.11.
• The advisory lists no fixed version for release lines before 7.133, such as 7.111, 7.117 or 7.125. As written, every version below 7.133.11 is affected.
• The advisory lists no workaround.

03

Find Artifactory in your clusters

Find the Artifactory pods, read the version from the image tag, and check whether a Service or Ingress makes the instance reachable from networks you do not control.

kubectl get pods -A -o custom-columns=\
NS:.metadata.namespace,POD:.metadata.name,\
'IMAGE:.spec.containers[*].image' | grep -i artifactory

kubectl get svc,ingress -A | grep -i artifactory

04

What configuration can show, and what it cannot

The Kubernetes API shows which version runs and how it is exposed. It cannot show whether a token was used beyond its scope: the exchange is an HTTP request to Artifactory and changes no Kubernetes object.

The reliable check for the flaw itself is in Artifactory. Wiz lists what to look for: POST requests to /access/api/v1/tokens that return admin-scoped tokens, admin users nobody created, and low-privilege identities listing users or reading and writing /artifactory/api/plugins.

What attackers do after is visible on the node. Shell commands run through a Groovy plugin, and a binary fetched into /tmp, /var/tmp or /dev/shm and started, are processes inside the Artifactory pod that no API object records.

kubectl exec -n <ns> <pod> -- \
  ls -la /tmp /var/tmp /dev/shm

05

Fixing it

Upgrade self-hosted Artifactory to 7.133.11 or later. The fixed versions JFrog lists for CVE-2026-82329 on the 7.133, 7.146 and 7.161 lines are all later than 7.133.11; its fixes for 7.111, 7.117 and 7.125 are not, and this advisory lists no fix on those lines.

The upgrade does not remove admin users, tokens or plugins created before it. Review those, and revoke tokens you did not issue.

06

Where Primod fits

Primod's per-node eBPF sensor records process executions and lineage per workload, so shell commands run through a plugin, or a binary started from /tmp, show up against the Artifactory pod. It does not see the token exchange; Artifactory's logs and the upgrade cover that.