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Critical severityOSV Advisory· Published Jan 27, 2026· Updated Jan 27, 2026

Kyverno Cross-Namespace Privilege Escalation via Policy apiCall

CVE-2026-22039

Description

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.

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Affected packages

Versions sourced from the GitHub Security Advisory.

PackageAffected versionsPatched versions
github.com/kyverno/kyvernoGo
< 1.15.31.15.3
github.com/kyverno/kyvernoGo
>= 1.16.0-rc.1, < 1.16.31.16.3

Affected products

50

Patches

Vulnerability mechanics

References

5

News mentions

0

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