CVE-2024-42488

Workarounds

As the underlying issue depends on a race condition, users unable to upgrade can restart the Cilium agent on affected nodes until the affected policies are confirmed to be working as expected.

Acknowledgements

The Cilium community has worked together with members of Google and Isovalent to prepare these mitigations. Special thanks to @skmatti for raising and resolving this issue.

For more information

If you have any questions or comments about this advisory, please reach out on Slack.

If you think you have found a vulnerability affecting Cilium, we strongly encourage you to report it to our security mailing list at [email protected]. This is a private mailing list for the Cilium security team, and your report will be treated as top priority.

A race condition in the Cilium agent can cause the agent to ignore labels that should be applied to a node. This could in turn cause CiliumClusterwideNetworkPolicies intended for nodes with the ignored label to not apply, leading to policy bypass.

Multiple concurrent operations access a shared resource without proper synchronization, producing unpredictable results depending on timing. Typical impact: TOCTOU exploits, data corruption, or privilege escalation.

CVE-2024-42488 has a CVSS score of 6.8 (Medium). The vector is network-reachable, no privileges required, and no user interaction. A CVSS score reflects the worst-case severity of the vulnerability, not your specific exposure. Whether this affects your application depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable in your environment. A fixed version is available (1.14.14, 1.15.8); upgrading removes the vulnerable code path.

Kodem intelligence

This issue was fixed in https://github.com/cilium/cilium/pull/33511.

This issue affects:

• All versions of Cilium before v1.14.14
• Cilium v1.15 between v1.15.0 and v1.15.7 inclusive

This issue has been patched in:

• Cilium v1.14.14
• Cilium v1.15.8

1. What is CVE-2024-42488? CVE-2024-42488 is a medium-severity race condition vulnerability in github.com/cilium/cilium (go), affecting versions < 1.14.14. It is fixed in 1.14.14, 1.15.8. Multiple concurrent operations access a shared resource without proper synchronization, producing unpredictable results depending on timing.
2. How severe is CVE-2024-42488? CVE-2024-42488 has a CVSS score of 6.8 (Medium). This score reflects the worst-case severity of the vulnerability, not your specific exposure. Whether it represents real risk in your environment depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable.
3. Which versions of github.com/cilium/cilium are affected by CVE-2024-42488? github.com/cilium/cilium (go) versions < 1.14.14 is affected.
4. Is there a fix for CVE-2024-42488? Yes. CVE-2024-42488 is fixed in 1.14.14, 1.15.8. Upgrade to this version or later.
5. Is CVE-2024-42488 exploitable, and should I be worried? Whether CVE-2024-42488 is exploitable in your environment depends on whether the vulnerable code is present and reachable. A CVSS score is a worst-case rating; it does not account for your specific deployment, configuration, or usage patterns. Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to show which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so you can focus on the ones that represent real risk. Get a demo
6. What actually determines whether CVE-2024-42488 is exploitable, and how bad it is? Exploitability and impact are not fixed properties of a CVE. They depend on runtime truth: whether the vulnerable code is present, reachable, and actually executes in your application. A high CVSS score on a dependency that never runs is not the same as real risk. Kodem, an Intelligent Application Security platform, uses runtime intelligence to reveal which vulnerabilities actually execute in production, so teams prioritize the ones that genuinely matter.
7. How do I fix CVE-2024-42488?
   • Upgrade github.com/cilium/cilium to 1.14.14 or later
   • Upgrade github.com/cilium/cilium to 1.15.8 or later