CVE-2026-22039 CRITICAL

CVE-2026-22039: Kyverno Cross-Namespace Privilege Escalation via Policy apiCall

Vendor Kyverno
Product kyverno
Weakness CWE-269
Published January 27, 2026
Last update January 27, 2026

CVSS base score

10.0/10
Attack vector Network
Attack complexity Low
Privileges required Low
User interaction None
Confidentiality High
Integrity High

CVSS vector

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

What the vulnerability does

01Description

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.

Key dates

02Disclosure timeline

January 27, 2026 CVE published
January 27, 2026 Record updated