Summary
Cilium vulnerable to sensitive information disclosure and cluster disruption via local Envoy admin socket access
Full technical description
Workarounds
There is no known workaround to this issue.
Acknowledgements
The Cilium community has worked together with members of Isovalent to prepare these mitigations. Special thanks to moemen for reporting the issue and 0xch4z for their work on triaging and remediating this issue.
For more information
If there are any questions or comments about this advisory, please reach out on [Slack (https://docs.cilium.io/en/latest/community/community/).
If anyone thinks they have found a vulnerability affecting Cilium, it is strongly encouraged to report it to the security mailing list at [email protected]. This is a private mailing list for the Cilium security team, and the report will be treated as a top priority.
Impact
When Cilium L7 functionality is enabled on a cluster, the Envoy instance supporting this functionality creates a world-accessible socket on cluster nodes. A local attacker would be able to access Envoy admin endpoints. Depending on deployment configuration, this can expose sensitive information or allow disruptive administrative operations, such as:
- Exposing TLS secrets
- Disrupting traffic in the cluster
- Terminating the Envoy process
This issue affects both the embedded and standalone Envoy deployment models.
The application does not perform an authorization check before performing a sensitive operation. Typical impact: unauthorized access to restricted functionality or data.
CVE-2026-49445 has a CVSS score of 9.2 (Critical). The vector is requires local access, 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 (1.19.2, 1.18.8, 1.17.14); upgrading removes the vulnerable code path.
Affected versions
Security releases
Kodem intelligence
Severity tells you how bad this could be in the worst case. It does not tell you whether you are exposed. Exploitability and impact are functions of runtime truth: whether the vulnerable code is present, reachable, and actually executes in your application. A vulnerable package can sit in your dependency tree and never run.
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. Kodem's runtime-powered SCA identifies whether this CVE is reachable in your applications.
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This issue affects:
- Cilium v1.19 between v1.19.0 and v1.19.1 inclusive
- Cilium v1.18 between v1.18.0 and v1.18.7 inclusive
- All versions of Cilium prior to v1.17.14
This issue has been patched in https://github.com/cilium/cilium/pull/44512, included in:
- Cilium v1.19.2
- Cilium v1.18.8
- Cilium v1.17.14
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is CVE-2026-49445? CVE-2026-49445 is a critical-severity missing authorization vulnerability in github.com/cilium/cilium (go), affecting versions >= 1.19.0, < 1.19.2. It is fixed in 1.19.2, 1.18.8, 1.17.14. The application does not perform an authorization check before performing a sensitive operation.
- How severe is CVE-2026-49445? CVE-2026-49445 has a CVSS score of 9.2 (Critical). 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.
- Which versions of github.com/cilium/cilium are affected by CVE-2026-49445? github.com/cilium/cilium (go) versions >= 1.19.0, < 1.19.2 is affected.
- Is there a fix for CVE-2026-49445? Yes. CVE-2026-49445 is fixed in 1.19.2, 1.18.8, 1.17.14. Upgrade to this version or later.
- Is CVE-2026-49445 exploitable, and should I be worried? Whether CVE-2026-49445 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
- What actually determines whether CVE-2026-49445 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.
- How do I fix CVE-2026-49445?
- Upgrade
github.com/cilium/ciliumto 1.19.2 or later - Upgrade
github.com/cilium/ciliumto 1.18.8 or later - Upgrade
github.com/cilium/ciliumto 1.17.14 or later
- Upgrade