You locked down RBAC. You scoped your namespaces. You followed least privilege. But the attacker who just became your GCP Org admin? They never left their namespace. The call came from inside the cluster—through your own operator.

I discovered confused deputy vulnerabilities (CWE-441) across Config Connector, ACK, ASO, and Crossplane. The pattern is universal: operators trust user-controlled CRD fields and act with elevated credentials. Your namespace user writes a manifest; the controller escalates them to cloud admin.

You'll see:
- Demo: namespace user → GCP Org admin in 60 seconds
- Why audit logs blame the controller, not the attacker
- A 3-step pattern to audit any operator for confused deputy flaws
- Architectural fixes you can deploy immediately

This research is also accepted at Black Hat USA 2026. This talk is Kubernetes-native: how operator architecture enables this flaw class and how to build controllers that fail closed.