Kyverno is a policy engine designed for cloud native platform engineering teams

Overview

Kyverno is a policy engine designed for cloud native platform engineering teams. From 1.18.0 until 1.18.2, the NamespacedMutatingPolicy CEL compiler exposes the generator library to matchConditions, allowing a namespace-scoped policy to invoke generator.apply(namespace, resources) with an arbitrary target namespace. The validation in pkg/cel/policies/mpol/validate.go checks that the policy compiles but does not enforce namespace scope, and GenerateResources in pkg/cel/libs/context.go does not reject the cross-namespace target. A user who can create NamespacedMutatingPolicy objects in one namespace can cause the admission controller, operating with cluster-wide privileges, to create ConfigMaps, NetworkPolicies, Secrets, RoleBindings, and other resources in another namespace, enabling unauthorized modification and potential privilege escalation. This issue is fixed in version 1.18.2.

Remediation

Refer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.

Package advisory (CVE-2026-54523)

Affected packages:

• github.com/kyverno/kyverno >= 1.18.0, <= 1.18.1

Patched in:

• github.com/kyverno/kyverno 1.18.2

Source: https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-79gf-7frw-68m9