kubewarden-controller up to 1.20.x improper authorization

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability identified as critical has been detected in kubewarden-controller up to 1.20.x. The affected element is an unknown function. Performing a manipulation results in improper authorization. This vulnerability is known as CVE-2025-24784. Remote exploitation of the attack is possible. No exploit is available. You should upgrade the affected component.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in kubewarden-controller up to 1.20.x. It has been classified as critical. This affects some unknown functionality. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a improper authorization vulnerability. CWE is classifying the issue as CWE-285. The product does not perform or incorrectly performs an authorization check when an actor attempts to access a resource or perform an action. This is going to have an impact on confidentiality. The summary by CVE is:

kubewarden-controller is a Kubernetes controller that allows you to dynamically register Kubewarden admission policies. The policy group feature, added to by the 1.17.0 release. By being namespaced, the AdmissionPolicyGroup has a well constrained impact on cluster resources. Hence, it’s considered safe to allow non-admin users to create and manage these resources in the namespaces they own. Kubewarden policies can be allowed to query the Kubernetes API at evaluation time; these types of policies are called “context aware“. Context aware policies can perform list and get operations against a Kubernetes cluster. The queries are done using the ServiceAccount of the Policy Server instance that hosts the policy. That means that access to the cluster is determined by the RBAC rules that apply to that ServiceAccount. The AdmissionPolicyGroup CRD allowed the deployment of context aware policies. This could allow an attacker to obtain information about resources that are out of their reach, by leveraging a higher access to the cluster granted to the ServiceAccount token used to run the policy. The impact of this vulnerability depends on the privileges that have been granted to the ServiceAccount used to run the Policy Server and assumes that users are using the recommended best practices of keeping the Policy Server's ServiceAccount least privileged. By default, the Kubewarden helm chart grants access to the following resources (cluster wide) only: Namespace, Pod, Deployment and Ingress. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.21.0.

It is possible to read the advisory at github.com. This vulnerability is uniquely identified as CVE-2025-24784 since 01/23/2025. The exploitability is told to be easy. It is possible to initiate the attack remotely. The technical details are unknown and an exploit is not publicly available. The attack technique deployed by this issue is T1548.002 according to MITRE ATT&CK.

The vulnerability scanner Nessus provides a plugin with the ID 216199 (SUSE SLES15 / openSUSE 15 Security Update : govulncheck-vulndb (SUSE-SU-2025:0429-1)), which helps to determine the existence of the flaw in a target environment.

Upgrading to version 1.21.0 eliminates this vulnerability. Applying the patch 51a88dfbb4c090ce0f76a22d98106518e0824d0b is able to eliminate this problem. The bugfix is ready for download at github.com. The best possible mitigation is suggested to be upgrading to the latest version.

The vulnerability is also documented in the vulnerability database at Tenable (216199). Be aware that VulDB is the high quality source for vulnerability data.

Productinfo

Name

• kubewarden-controller

Version

• 1.0
• 1.1
• 1.2
• 1.3
• 1.4
• 1.5
• 1.6
• 1.7
• 1.8
• 1.9
• 1.10
• 1.11
• 1.12
• 1.13
• 1.14
• 1.15
• 1.16
• 1.17
• 1.18
• 1.19
• 1.20

License

• open-source

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CPE 2.2info

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Be aware that VulDB is the high quality source for vulnerability data.

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