Privilege escalation in Kyverno

CVE-2026-22039

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.

Vulnerability class: Privilege Escalation

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 9.9 (Critical). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.006 (45.6th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 46th percentile — 45.6% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2026-22039: held from 0.005 to 0.006.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.005 · newest: 0.006 · change: +0.000

Affected products

  • Kyverno — versions < 1.15.3, >= 1.16.0, < 1.16.3

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-22039?
CVE-2026-22039 is a critical-severity vulnerability in Kyverno, classified under Improper Privilege Management. CVSS score: 9.9/10. Published 2026-01-27.
How severe is CVE-2026-22039?
Critical severity. CVSS v3 base score is 9.9 out of 10.