Cilium vulnerable to bypass of namespace restrictions in CiliumNetworkPolicy

Impact

An attacker with the ability to create or modify CiliumNetworkPolicy objects in a particular namespace is able to affect traffic on an entire Cilium cluster, potentially bypassing policy enforcement in other namespaces.

By using a crafted endpointSelector that uses the DoesNotExist operator on the reserved:init label, the attacker can create policies that bypass namespace restrictions and affect the entire Cilium cluster. This includes potentially allowing or denying all traffic.

This attack requires API server access, as described in the Kubernetes API Server Attacker section of the Cilium Threat Model.

Patches

This issue was patched in https://github.com/cilium/cilium/pull/28007

This issue affects:

• Cilium <= v1.14.1
• Cilium <= v1.13.6
• Cilium <= v1.12.13

This issue has been resolved in:

• Cilium v1.14.2
• Cilium v1.13.7
• Cilium v1.12.14

Workarounds

An admission webhook can be used to prevent the use of endpointSelectors that use the DoesNotExist operator on the reserved:init label in CiliumNetworkPolicies.

Acknowledgements

The Cilium community has worked together with members of Palantir and Isovalent to prepare these mitigations. Special thanks to @odinuge for reporting this issue and @joestringer for the fix.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory, please reach out on Slack.

If you think you have found a vulnerability in Cilium, we strongly encourage you to report it to our private security mailing list at [email protected] first, before disclosing it in any public forum. This is a private mailing list for Cilium’s internal security team, and your report will be treated as top priority.