kyverno CVE Vulnerabilities & Metrics

Kyverno is a policy engine designed for cloud native platform engineering teams. Prior to versions 1.17.2 and 1.16.4, an unchecked type assertion in the `forEach` mutation handler allows any user with permission to create a `Policy` or `ClusterPolicy` to crash the cluster-wide background controller into a persistent CrashLoopBackOff. The same bug also causes the admission controller to drop connections and block all matching resource operations. The crash loop persists until the policy is deleted. The vulnerability is confined to the legacy engine, and CEL-based policies are unaffected. Versions 1.17.2 and 1.16.4 fix the issue.

Kyverno is a policy engine designed for cloud native platform engineering teams. Prior to versions 1.18.0-rc1, 1.17.2-rc1, and 1.16.4, Kyverno's apiCall feature in ClusterPolicy automatically attaches the admission controller's ServiceAccount token to outgoing HTTP requests. The service URL has no validation — it can point anywhere, including attacker-controlled servers. Since the admission controller SA has permissions to patch webhook configurations, a stolen token leads to full cluster compromise. Versions 1.18.0-rc1, 1.17.2-rc1, and 1.16.4 patch the issue.

Kyverno is a policy engine designed for cloud native platform engineering teams. The patch for CVE-2026-22039 fixed cross-namespace privilege escalation in Kyverno's `apiCall` context by validating the `URLPath` field. However, the ConfigMap context loader has the identical vulnerability — the `configMap.namespace` field accepts any namespace with zero validation, allowing a namespace admin to read ConfigMaps from any namespace using Kyverno's privileged service account. This is a complete RBAC bypass in multi-tenant Kubernetes clusters. An updated fix is available in version 1.17.2.

Kyverno is a policy engine designed for cloud native platform engineering teams. Prior to 1.16.4, kyverno’s apiCall servicecall helper implicitly injects Authorization: Bearer ... using the kyverno controller serviceaccount token when a policy does not explicitly set an Authorization header. Because context.apiCall.service.url is policy-controlled, this can send the kyverno serviceaccount token to an attacker-controlled endpoint (confused deputy). Namespaced policies are blocked from servicecall usage by the namespaced urlPath gate in pkg/engine/apicall/apiCall.go, so this report is scoped to ClusterPolicy and global context usage. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.16.4.

Kyverno, versions 1.16.0 and later, are vulnerable to SSRF due to unrestricted CEL HTTP functions.

Kyverno is a policy engine designed for cloud native platform engineering teams. Versions prior to 1.16.3 and 1.15.3 have unbounded memory consumption in Kyverno's policy engine that allows users with policy creation privileges to cause denial of service by crafting policies that exponentially amplify string data through context variables. Versions 1.16.3 and 1.15.3 contain a patch for the vulnerability.

Kyverno is a policy engine designed for cloud native platform engineering teams. Versions prior to 1.16.3 and 1.15.3 have a critical authorization boundary bypass in namespaced Kyverno Policy apiCall. The resolved `urlPath` is executed using the Kyverno admission controller ServiceAccount, with no enforcement that the request is limited to the policy’s namespace. As a result, any authenticated user with permission to create a namespaced Policy can cause Kyverno to perform Kubernetes API requests using Kyverno’s admission controller identity, targeting any API path allowed by that ServiceAccount’s RBAC. This breaks namespace isolation by enabling cross-namespace reads (for example, ConfigMaps and, where permitted, Secrets) and allows cluster-scoped or cross-namespace writes (for example, creating ClusterPolicies) by controlling the urlPath through context variable substitution. Versions 1.16.3 and 1.15.3 contain a patch for the vulnerability.

Kyverno is a policy engine designed for cloud native platform engineering teams. In versions 1.14.1 and below, a Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability exists due to improper handling of JMESPath variable substitutions. Attackers with permissions to create or update Kyverno policies can craft expressions using the {{@}} variable combined with a pipe and an invalid JMESPath function (e.g., {{@ | non_existent_function }}). This leads to a nil value being substituted into the policy structure. Subsequent processing by internal functions, specifically getValueAsStringMap, which expect string values, results in a panic due to a type assertion failure (interface {} is nil, not string). This crashes Kyverno worker threads in the admission controller and causes continuous crashes of the reports controller pod. This is fixed in version 1.14.2.

Kyverno is a policy engine designed for cloud native platform engineering teams. Prior to versions 1.13.5 and 1.14.0, it may happen that policy rules using namespace selector(s) in their match statements are mistakenly not applied during admission review request processing due to a missing error propagation in function `GetNamespaceSelectorsFromNamespaceLister` in `pkg/utils/engine/labels.go`. As a consequence, security-critical mutations and validations are bypassed, potentially allowing attackers with K8s API access to perform malicious operations. This issue has been patched in versions 1.13.5 and 1.14.0.

Kyverno is a policy engine designed for cloud native platform engineering teams. Prior to version 1.14.0-alpha.1, Kyverno ignores subjectRegExp and IssuerRegExp while verifying artifact's sign with keyless mode. It allows the attacker to deploy kubernetes resources with the artifacts that were signed by unexpected certificate. Deploying these unauthorized kubernetes resources can lead to full compromise of kubernetes cluster. Version 1.14.0-alpha.1 contains a patch for the issue.

Kyverno is a policy engine designed for Kubernetes. An issue was found in Kyverno that allowed an attacker to control the digest of images used by Kyverno users. The issue would require the attacker to compromise the registry that the Kyverno users fetch their images from. The attacker could then return an vulnerable image to the the user and leverage that to further escalate their position. As such, the attacker would need to know which images the Kyverno user consumes and know of one of multiple exploitable vulnerabilities in previous digests of the images. Alternatively, if the attacker has compromised the registry, they could craft a malicious image with a different digest with intentionally placed vulnerabilities and deliver the image to the user. Users pulling their images by digests and from trusted registries are not impacted by this vulnerability. There is no evidence of this being exploited in the wild. The issue has been patched in 1.10.5. All users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.

An image signature validation bypass vulnerability in Kyverno 1.8.3 and 1.8.4 allows a malicious image registry (or a man-in-the-middle attacker) to inject unsigned arbitrary container images into a protected Kubernetes cluster. This is fixed in 1.8.5. This has been fixed in 1.8.5 and mitigations are available for impacted releases.