Ingress-nginx directive injection via annotations

published 2022-05-06 4 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2021-12630

cvss: 7.6; version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev: Not listed; not in CISA's catalog
epss: 1.4%; EPSS 1.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 73%
public exploits: 0; none known

A security issue was discovered in ingress-nginx where a user that can create or update ingress objects can use .metadata.annotations in an Ingress object (in the networking.k8s.io or extensions API group) to obtain the credentials of the ingress-nginx controller. In the default configuration, that credential has access to all secrets in the cluster.

Patch / fix

fixed in 1 distros 1

Kubernetes Kubernetes ingress-nginx 1.2.0

kubectl-ingress-nginx Arch Linux 1.2.0-1

arch linux advisories AVG-2690

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2021-25746 updated 2026-03-27 cvss 7.1

k8s.io/ingress-nginx: directive injection via annotations

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2 rhacm2/management-ingress-rhel8
not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

1.44% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 73% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by	version	score	vector
CNA	3.1	7.6	CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:L/A:L
NVD	3.1	7.1	CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:L/A:N
NVD	2.0	5.5	AV:N/AC:L/Au:S/C:P/I:P/A:N

Affected products

Kubernetes Kubernetes ingress-nginx

Classification

Weakness

CWE-20 Improper Input Validation

Technology feeds

Kubernetes rss critical rss

References

groups.google.com /g/kubernetes-security-announce/c/hv2-SfdqcfQ
issue-tracking, mitigation, third-party-advisory
github.com /kubernetes/ingress-nginx/issues/8503
issue-tracking, mitigation, third-party-advisory
security.netapp.com /advisory/ntap-20220609-0006/
third-party-advisory

Sources

CVE List CVE-2021-25746
NVD CVE-2021-25746

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.

Summary