Cilium up to 1.14.17/1.15.11/1.16.4 DNS allocation of resources

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability was found in Cilium up to 1.14.17/1.15.11/1.16.4. It has been declared as problematic. This impacts an unknown function of the component DNS Handler. The manipulation results in allocation of resources. This vulnerability is reported as CVE-2025-23028. The attack can be launched remotely. No exploit exists. It is recommended to upgrade the affected component.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in Cilium up to 1.14.17/1.15.11/1.16.4. It has been classified as problematic. Affected is some unknown processing of the component DNS Handler. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a allocation of resources vulnerability. CWE is classifying the issue as CWE-770. The product allocates a reusable resource or group of resources on behalf of an actor without imposing any restrictions on the size or number of resources that can be allocated, in violation of the intended security policy for that actor. This is going to have an impact on availability. CVE summarizes:

Cilium is a networking, observability, and security solution with an eBPF-based dataplane. A denial of service vulnerability affects versions 1.14.0 through 1.14.7, 1.15.0 through 1.15.11, and 1.16.0 through 1.16.4. In a Kubernetes cluster where Cilium is configured to proxy DNS traffic, an attacker can crash Cilium agents by sending a crafted DNS response to workloads from outside the cluster. For traffic that is allowed but without using DNS-based policy, the dataplane will continue to pass traffic as configured at the time of the DoS. For workloads that have DNS-based policy configured, existing connections may continue to operate, and new connections made without relying on DNS resolution may continue to be established, but new connections which rely on DNS resolution may be disrupted. Any configuration changes that affect the impacted agent may not be applied until the agent is able to restart. This issue is fixed in Cilium v1.14.18, v1.15.12, and v1.16.5. No known workarounds are available.

The advisory is available at github.com. This vulnerability is traded as CVE-2025-23028 since 01/10/2025. The exploitability is told to be easy. It is possible to launch the attack remotely. The exploitation doesn't require any form of authentication. The technical details are unknown and an exploit is not available. This vulnerability is assigned to T1499 by the MITRE ATT&CK project.

The vulnerability scanner Nessus provides a plugin with the ID 214906 (SUSE SLES15 / openSUSE 15 Security Update : govulncheck-vulndb (SUSE-SU-2025:0297-1)), which helps to determine the existence of the flaw in a target environment.

Upgrading to version 1.14.18, 1.15.12 or 1.16.5 eliminates this vulnerability.

The vulnerability is also documented in the vulnerability database at Tenable (214906). If you want to get best quality of vulnerability data, you may have to visit VulDB.

Productinfo

Name

• Cilium

Version

• 1.14.0
• 1.14.1
• 1.14.2
• 1.14.3
• 1.14.4
• 1.14.5
• 1.14.6
• 1.14.7
• 1.14.8
• 1.14.9
• 1.14.10
• 1.14.11
• 1.14.12
• 1.14.13
• 1.14.14
• 1.14.15
• 1.14.16
• 1.14.17
• 1.15.0
• 1.15.1
• 1.15.2
• 1.15.3
• 1.15.4
• 1.15.5
• 1.15.6
• 1.15.7
• 1.15.8
• 1.15.9
• 1.15.10
• 1.15.11
• 1.16.0
• 1.16.1
• 1.16.2
• 1.16.3
• 1.16.4

Website

• Product: https://github.com/cilium/cilium/

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If you want to get best quality of vulnerability data, you may have to visit VulDB.

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