RCE in Projectcontour Contour

CVE-2026-41246

Contour is a Kubernetes ingress controller using Envoy proxy. From v1.19.0 to before v1.33.4, v1.32.5, and v1.31.6, Contour's Cookie Rewriting feature is vulnerable to Lua code injection. An attacker with RBAC permissions to create or modify HTTPProxy resources can craft a malicious value in spec.routes[].cookieRewritePolicies[].pathRewrite.value or spec.routes[].services[].cookieRewritePolicies[].pathRewrite.value that results in arbitrary code execution in the Envoy proxy. The cookie rewriting feature is internally implemented using Envoy's HTTP Lua filter. User-controlled values are interpolated into Lua source code using Go text/template without sufficient sanitization. The injected code only executes when processing traffic on the attacker's own route, which they already control. However, since Envoy runs as shared infrastructure, the injected code can also read Envoy's xDS client credentials from the filesystem or cause denial of service for other tenants sharing the Envoy instance. This vulnerability is fixed in v1.33.4, v1.32.5, and v1.31.6.

Vulnerability class: RCE (Remote Code Execution)

EPSS: 0.005 (40.4th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 8.1 (High). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:H.

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-41246?
CVE-2026-41246 is a high-severity vulnerability in Projectcontour Contour, classified under Code Injection. CVSS score: 8.1/10. Published 2026-04-23.
How severe is CVE-2026-41246?
High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 8.1 out of 10.