CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-16543

HighCVSS 7.1
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.14%

4th percentile - higher than 4% of all known CVEs

Summary

A vulnerability in Kong Operator (with embedded KIC) allows a user with namespace-scoped Secret creation privileges to cause a cluster-wide ingress configuration denial of service. KIC collects CA-certificate Secrets using only a label selector, without ingress-class or namespace restrictions. Duplicate CA-certificate IDs cause Kong Gateway to reject the entire configuration document, halting all ingress changes.

Risk Assessment

An attacker can block all ingress configuration changes in the Kubernetes cluster, leading to application disruptions and loss of availability.

Recommendation

Restrict Secret creation privileges to trusted users only and consider implementing additional validation for CA certificate ID uniqueness.

Related vulnerabilities

Original NVD description (English source)

Kong Operator's embedded Kong Kubernetes Ingress Controller (KIC) allows a user with namespace-scoped Secret creation privileges to cause a cluster-wide ingress configuration denial of service. The embedded KIC collects CA-certificate Secrets across all watched namespaces using a label selector alone, without ingress-class or namespace restrictions. The CA-certificate primary key is derived from a user-supplied field in the Secret. Duplicate CA-certificate IDs cause Kong Gateway to reject the entire configuration document and halting all ingress changes cluster-wide.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS