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DoS in Cilium agent DNS proxy from crafted DNS responses

Moderate severity GitHub Reviewed Published Jan 22, 2025 in cilium/cilium • Updated Jan 22, 2025

Package

gomod github.com/cilium/cilium (Go)

Affected versions

>= 1.14.0, < 1.14.18
>= 1.15.0, < 1.15.12
>= 1.16.0, < 1.16.5

Patched versions

1.14.18
1.15.12
1.16.5

Description

Impact

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.

Patches

This issue affects:

  • Cilium v1.14 between v1.14.0 and v1.14.17 inclusive
  • Cilium v1.15 between v1.15.0 and v1.15.11 inclusive
  • Cilium v1.16 between v1.16.0 and v1.16.4 inclusive

This issue is fixed in:

  • Cilium v1.14.18
  • Cilium v1.15.12
  • Cilium v1.16.5

Workarounds

There are no known workarounds to this issue.

Acknowledgements

The Cilium community has worked together with members of Isovalent and the Cisco Advanced Security Initiatives Group (ASIG) to prepare these mitigations. Special thanks to @kokelley-cisco for reporting this issue and @bimmlerd for the fix.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory, please reach out on Slack.

If you think you have found a vulnerability affecting Cilium, we strongly encourage you to report it to our security mailing list at [email protected]. This is a private mailing list for the Cilium security team, and your report will be treated as top priority.

References

@ferozsalam ferozsalam published to cilium/cilium Jan 22, 2025
Published by the National Vulnerability Database Jan 22, 2025
Published to the GitHub Advisory Database Jan 22, 2025
Reviewed Jan 22, 2025
Last updated Jan 22, 2025

Severity

Moderate

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
None
User interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
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:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

Weaknesses

CVE ID

CVE-2025-23028

GHSA ID

GHSA-9m5p-c77c-f9j7

Source code

Credits

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