What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-88021: Consul vulnerable to an authorization bypass in the Connect service mesh
- Severity: high (CVSS 7.1 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2026-09-10 · updated 2026-09-10
- Weakness: CWE-185
Description
Consul and Consul Enterprise are vulnerable to an authorization bypass in the Connect service mesh that may allow a service to reach a destination it is not authorized to access. When building Envoy RBAC rules to enforce Connect intentions, Consul did not correctly escape certain characters in service names, namespaces, and partitions, causing the generated authorization rules to match more broadly than intended. This vulnerability (CVE-2026-88021) is fixed in Consul 2.0.4 and Consul Enterprise 1.21.18, 1.22.12 and 2.0.4.
Affected products
- HashiCorp Consul: from 1.9.0 before 2.0.4 — fixed in 2.0.4
- HashiCorp Consul Enterprise: from 1.9.0 before 2.0.4 — fixed in 2.0.4
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: HashiCorp Consul 2.0.4; HashiCorp Consul Enterprise 2.0.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
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