CVE-2025-48056

Workarounds

Hubble CLI users who are unable to upgrade can direct their Hubble flows to a log file and inspect the output within a text editor.

Acknowledgements

The Cilium community has worked together with members of Isovalent and the Cisco ASIG team to prepare these mitigations. Special thanks to @bipierce-cisco and @kokelley-cisco for reporting the issue and to @devodev for the fix.

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 network attacker could inject malicious control characters into Hubble CLI terminal output, potentially leading to loss of integrity and manipulation of the output. This could be leveraged to conceal log entries, rewrite output, or even make the terminal temporarily unusable. Exploitation of this attack would require the victim to be monitoring Kafka traffic using Layer 7 Protocol Visibility at the time of the attack.

CVE-2025-48056 has a CVSS score of 5.3 (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 (1.17.2); upgrading removes the vulnerable code path.

Kodem intelligence

This issue affects all versions of Hubble CLI before v1.17.2. The issue is patched in Hubble CLI v1.17.2, via https://github.com/cilium/cilium/pull/37401.

1. What is CVE-2025-48056? CVE-2025-48056 is a medium-severity security vulnerability in github.com/cilium/hubble (go), affecting versions < 1.17.2. It is fixed in 1.17.2.
2. How severe is CVE-2025-48056? CVE-2025-48056 has a CVSS score of 5.3 (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/hubble are affected by CVE-2025-48056? github.com/cilium/hubble (go) versions < 1.17.2 is affected.
4. Is there a fix for CVE-2025-48056? Yes. CVE-2025-48056 is fixed in 1.17.2. Upgrade to this version or later.
5. Is CVE-2025-48056 exploitable, and should I be worried? Whether CVE-2025-48056 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-2025-48056 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-2025-48056? Upgrade github.com/cilium/hubble to 1.17.2 or later.