What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-18677: Kong Mesh: a dataplane token without a workload binding can claim any workload's SPIFFE identity

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.0 v4.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-08-12 · updated 2026-10-23
• Weakness: CWE-290

Description

In Kong Mesh running in universal mode with a MeshIdentity whose SPIFFE ID path template derives from the dataplane's kuma.io/workload label, the XDS authenticator in kuma-cp validates that label only when the dataplane token is bound to a workload. Workload binding is optional, so a dataplane presenting a tags-bound token can register with kuma.io/workload set to any value and obtain another workload's SPIFFE identity.

Affected products

• Kong Inc. Kong Mesh: from 2.13.0 before 2.13.10; from 2.14.0 before 2.14.2 — fixed in 2.13.10, 2.14.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Kong Inc. Kong Mesh 2.13.10, 2.14.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://developer.konghq.com/mesh/changelog/
• https://github.com/kumahq/kuma/pull/17474
• https://github.com/kumahq/kuma/pull/17502
• https://github.com/kumahq/kuma/pull/17503
• https://github.com/kumahq/kuma/security/advisories/GHSA-744g-c785-x65q

Get alerted when CVE-2026-18677 or the next vulnerability affects your stack