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Ingress nginx annotation injection causes arbitrary command execution

High severity GitHub Reviewed Published Oct 25, 2023 to the GitHub Advisory Database • Updated Nov 3, 2023

Package

gomod k8s.io/ingress-nginx (Go)

Affected versions

< 1.9.0

Patched versions

1.9.0

Description

Issue Details

A security issue was identified in ingress-nginx where the nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/configuration-snippet annotation on an Ingress object (in the networking.k8s.io or extensions API group) can be used to inject arbitrary commands, and obtain the credentials of the ingress-nginx controller. In the default configuration, that credential has access to all secrets in the cluster.

This issue has been rated High (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:L/A:L), and assigned CVE-2023-5043.

Affected Components and Configurations

This bug affects ingress-nginx. If you do not have ingress-nginx installed on your cluster, you are not affected. You can check this by running kubectl get po -n ingress-nginx.

If you are running the “chrooted” ingress-nginx controller introduced in v1.2.0 (gcr.io/k8s-staging-ingress-nginx/controller-chroot), command execution is possible but credential extraction is not, so the High severity does not apply.

Multi-tenant environments where non-admin users have permissions to create Ingress objects are most affected by this issue.

Affected Versions

<v1.9.0

Versions allowing mitigation

v1.9.0

Mitigation

Ingress Administrators should set the --enable-annotation-validation flag to enforce restrictions on the contents of ingress-nginx annotation fields.

Detection

If you find evidence that this vulnerability has been exploited, please contact [email protected]

Additional Details

See ingress-nginx Issue #10571 for more details.

Acknowledgements

This vulnerability was reported by suanve

Thank You,
CJ Cullen on behalf of the Kubernetes Security Response Committee

References

Published by the National Vulnerability Database Oct 25, 2023
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database Oct 25, 2023
Reviewed Nov 3, 2023
Last updated Nov 3, 2023

Severity

High

CVSS overall score

This score calculates overall vulnerability severity from 0 to 10 and is based on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS).
/ 10

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector
Network
Attack complexity
Low
Privileges required
Low
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
High
Integrity
Low
Availability
Low

CVSS v3 base metrics

Attack vector: More severe the more the remote (logically and physically) an attacker can be in order to exploit the vulnerability.
Attack complexity: More severe for the least complex attacks.
Privileges required: More severe if no privileges are required.
User interaction: More severe when no user interaction is required.
Scope: More severe when a scope change occurs, e.g. one vulnerable component impacts resources in components beyond its security scope.
Confidentiality: More severe when loss of data confidentiality is highest, measuring the level of data access available to an unauthorized user.
Integrity: More severe when loss of data integrity is the highest, measuring the consequence of data modification possible by an unauthorized user.
Availability: More severe when the loss of impacted component availability is highest.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:L/A:L

EPSS score

0.262%
(66th percentile)

CVE ID

CVE-2023-5043

GHSA ID

GHSA-5wj4-wffq-3378

Source code

No known source code
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