The CVSS 8.5 rating on this CVE misrepresents the actual risk profile you face. This isn't a simple password disclosure—it's a credential isolation failure that exposes the platform's own superuser credentials through a side channel that exists by design in production PostgreSQL deployments.
CloudNativePG's SetUserPassword function embeds cleartext passwords directly into ALTER ROLE and CREATE ROLE SQL statements. When pg_stat_statements is preloaded with track_utility enabled—standard production configuration for observability—these statements become queryable by any user granted pg_monitor or pg_read_all_stats. An untrusted tenant with monitoring privileges can extract the platform's own administrative credentials from the query audit trail.
The SCRAM-SHA-256 exemption in the patch reveals something the CVSS score obscures: the codebase already distinguished between credential types, protecting SCRAM verifiers while leaving cleartext passwords exposed. This conditional handling created a false confidence anchor—someone had demonstrably 'handled credentials safely' in one path, reducing urgency on the other.
The prerequisite conditions being framed as mitigating factors is backwards reasoning. If your multi-tenant CNP deployment grants pg_monitor to untrusted tenants—which the platform's observability model requires—then the attack surface isn't narrow, it's your production environment. The COPY FROM PROGRAM vector then escalates from credential disclosure to container escape, converting database access into host compromise.
Your priority: verify whether pg_stat_statements is loaded and track_utility is enabled in your CNP clusters. If both are true, any user with pg_monitor can query historical password operations. The patch addresses the symptom, but the architectural question is whether Kubernetes-native database operators can provide meaningful credential isolation when observability infrastructure inherently creates queryable channels for every SQL operation. Consider whether your tenant isolation model actually permits granting pg_monitor to untrusted workloads—or whether that assumption itself was the initial failure.