CVE-2026-52724: kuma-dp connects to control plane without verifying TLS certificate when no CA is configured

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.8 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: 2026-09-15 · updated 2026-09-30
Weakness: CWE-295

Description

Kuma is a modern Envoy-based service mesh that can run on every cloud across both Kubernetes and VMs. Prior to 2.7.26, 2.9.16, 2.11.14, 2.12.11, and 2.13.7, Universal mode kuma-dp connections to an HTTPS control plane disable TLS peer verification when --ca-cert-file is not supplied and KUMA_CONTROL_PLANE_CA_CERT is unset. The dataplane authentication token is sent over the unverified connection, allowing an on-path attacker to intercept the token, impersonate the control plane, inject a forged bootstrap configuration, and take over the proxy. Standard Kubernetes installations created by kumactl install control-plane or the official Helm chart are unaffected because the mutating admission webhook injects KUMA_CONTROL_PLANE_CA_CERT into each sidecar. This issue is fixed in versions 2.7.26, 2.9.16, 2.11.14, 2.12.11, and 2.13.7.

Affected products

kumahq kuma: before 2.7.26; from 2.8.0, < 2.9.16; from 2.10.0, < 2.11.14; from 2.12.0, < 2.12.11; from 2.13.0, < 2.13.7

References

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