CVE-2025-47281: Kyverno's Improper JMESPath Variable Evaluation Leads to Denial of Service

Severity: high (CVSS 7.7 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2025-07-23 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-20

Description

Kyverno is a policy engine designed for cloud native platform engineering teams. In versions 1.14.1 and below, a Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability exists due to improper handling of JMESPath variable substitutions. Attackers with permissions to create or update Kyverno policies can craft expressions using the {{@}} variable combined with a pipe and an invalid JMESPath function (e.g., {{@ | non_existent_function }}). This leads to a nil value being substituted into the policy structure. Subsequent processing by internal functions, specifically getValueAsStringMap, which expect string values, results in a panic due to a type assertion failure (interface {} is nil, not string). This crashes Kyverno worker threads in the admission controller and causes continuous crashes of the reports controller pod. This is fixed in version 1.14.2.

Affected products

kyverno: before 1.14.2 — fixed in 1.14.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: kyverno 1.14.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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