CVE-2026-54523CWE-862broken-access-control

CVE-2026-54523

Critical · published August 26, 2026

CVSS v3.1
9.6
EPSS
0%
Percentile
39.4
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

Kyverno is a policy engine designed for cloud native platform engineering teams. From 1.18.0 until 1.18.2, the NamespacedMutatingPolicy CEL compiler exposes the generator library to matchConditions, allowing a namespace-scoped policy to invoke generator.apply(namespace, resources) with an arbitrary target namespace. The validation in pkg/cel/policies/mpol/validate.go checks that the policy compiles but does not enforce namespace scope, and GenerateResources in pkg/cel/libs/context.go does not reject the cross-namespace target. A user who can create NamespacedMutatingPolicy objects in one namespace can cause the admission controller, operating with cluster-wide privileges, to create ConfigMaps, NetworkPolicies, Secrets, RoleBindings, and other resources in another namespace, enabling unauthorized modification and potential privilege escalation. This issue is fixed in version 1.18.2.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
9.6 · CRITICAL
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:N
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00466 · 39.4th percentile
Weakness
CWE-862 · Missing Authorization
Published
2026-08-26T19:16Z
References (7)
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 28 AUG 06:46Z
    EPSS moved — → 0%
    epss
  • 26 AUG 14:20Z
    Kyverno: NamespacedGeneratingPolicy generator.apply() namespace argument unvalidated -- background controller creates RoleBindings in any namespace including kube-system
    cvelistv5