What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-41485: Kyverno Controller Denial of Service via forEach Mutation Panic

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.7 v3.1)
• 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: yes
• Published: 2026-04-24 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-617

Description

Kyverno is a policy engine designed for cloud native platform engineering teams. Prior to versions 1.17.2 and 1.16.4, an unchecked type assertion in the `forEach` mutation handler allows any user with permission to create a `Policy` or `ClusterPolicy` to crash the cluster-wide background controller into a persistent CrashLoopBackOff. The same bug also causes the admission controller to drop connections and block all matching resource operations. The crash loop persists until the policy is deleted. The vulnerability is confined to the legacy engine, and CEL-based policies are unaffected. Versions 1.17.2 and 1.16.4 fix the issue.

Affected products

• kyverno: from 1.13.0 before 1.16.4; from 1.17.0 before 1.17.2 — fixed in 1.16.4, 1.17.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: kyverno 1.16.4, 1.17.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://github.com/kyverno/kyverno/commit/76c8fdbe87328722e099e1fd44c3f21c9f7809cb
• https://github.com/kyverno/kyverno/commit/80e728c2283a0c65e5adb02d8a907106e6ebe7e3
• https://github.com/kyverno/kyverno/security/advisories/GHSA-fpjq-c37h-cqcv
• https://github.com/kyverno/kyverno/security/advisories/GHSA-fpjq-c37h-cqcv

Get alerted when CVE-2026-41485 or the next vulnerability affects your stack