CVE-2026-22039: critical vulnerability in kyverno
Kyverno Cross-Namespace Privilege Escalation via Policy apiCall
Published
E-mail alert when it lands in KEV, gets a public PoC or its score goes up.
28Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 10epss 0.6%
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.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H
Affected products
kyverno · kyvernoRelated CVEs — kyverno
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2025-46342HIGHKyverno vulnerable to bypass of policy rules that use namespace selectors in match statementsEPSS 0.8%CVE-2023-42814LOWDenial of service from malicious image manifest in kyvernoEPSS 0.7%CVE-2023-42815LOWDenial of service from malicious image manifest in kyvernoEPSS 0.7%CVE-2023-42813MEDIUMDenial of service from malicious manifest in kyvernoEPSS 0.7%CVE-2026-23881HIGHKyverno Denial of Service via Context Variable Amplification in Policy EngineEPSS 0.6%CVE-2026-100706CRITICALkyverno before 1.19.1 Privilege Escalation via Policy apiCall urlPathEPSS 0.6%