Overview
CVE-2025-46342 is a critical vulnerability affecting Kyverno, a policy engine designed for Kubernetes (K8s) that is widely used by cloud-native platform engineering teams. This vulnerability has the potential to permit unauthorized actions within K8s, and by extension, could lead to a system compromise or data leakage.
As cloud-native technologies continue to dominate the IT landscape, ensuring robust security becomes increasingly important. This vulnerability in Kyverno, if left unpatched, could have serious implications, potentially allowing attackers to bypass security-critical mutations and validations and perform malicious operations.
Vulnerability Summary
CVE ID: CVE-2025-46342
Severity: High (8.5 CVSS Score)
Attack Vector: Network
Privileges Required: Low
User Interaction: None
Impact: Potential system compromise or data leakage
Affected Products
No phone number, email, or personal info required.
Product | Affected Versions
Kyverno | < 1.13.5 Kyverno | < 1.14.0 How the Exploit Works
This vulnerability stems from a failure to correctly apply policy rules that use namespace selectors in their match statements during the admission review request processing. This is due to a missing error propagation in the function `GetNamespaceSelectorsFromNamespaceLister` in `pkg/utils/engine/labels.go`. As a result, an attacker with K8s API access could potentially bypass security-critical mutations and validations, permitting them to execute malicious operations.
Conceptual Example Code
This vulnerability doesn’t necessitate a specific payload to be exploited. Instead, it’s the lack of policy rule enforcement that can be leveraged. However, an attacker would need access to the K8s API, which could potentially be done using a command like this:
kubectl exec -it pod-name -- /bin/bashThis command would provide the attacker with shell access to the specified pod. From here, the attacker could potentially perform a plethora of malicious operations, given the lack of policy rule enforcement caused by this vulnerability.