An authentication and authorization bypass vulnerability exists in F5 NGINX Kubernetes Ingress Controller (NIC) when configured with the `ExternalAuth` policy or Ingress external authentication

Overview

An authentication and authorization bypass vulnerability exists in F5 NGINX Kubernetes Ingress Controller (NIC) when configured with the ExternalAuth policy or Ingress external authentication. Client-supplied X-Forwarded-Prefix, X-Forwarded-URI, X-Original-URI, and X-Forwarded-Method routing and method headers are forwarded unsanitized into the internal authentication subrequest (handled by the NGINX auth_request directive). As a result, an unauthenticated, remote attacker may spoof request attributes evaluated by the external authentication provider.

Impact: This vulnerability may allow remote attackers

unauthenticated

access to protected

paths. There is no control plane exposure; this is a data plane issue only.

Note: Software versions which have reached End of Technical Support (EoTS) are not evaluated.

Remediation

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