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GHSA-pwqm-x5x6-5586
No affected components available
Impact
Users of IPsec transparent encryption in Cilium may be vulnerable to cryptographic attacks that render the transparent encryption ineffective.
In particular, Cilium is vulnerable to the following attacks by a man-in-the-middle attacker:
- Chosen plaintext attacks
- Key recovery attacks
- Replay attacks
These attacks are possible due to an ESP sequence number collision when multiple nodes are configured with the same key. Fixed versions of Cilium use unique keys for each IPsec tunnel established between nodes, resolving all of the above attacks.
Important: After upgrading, users must perform a key rotation using the instructions here to ensure that they are no longer vulnerable to this issue. Please note that the key rotation instructions have recently been updated, and users must use the new instructions to properly establish secure IPsec tunnels. To validate that the new instructions have been followed properly, ensure that the IPsec Kubernetes secret contains a "+" sign.
Patches
All prior versions of Cilium that support IPsec transparent encryption (Cilium 1.4 onwards) are affected by this issue.
Patched versions:
- Cilium 1.15.3
- Cilium 1.14.9
- Cilium 1.13.14
Workarounds
There is no workaround to this issue. IPsec transparent encryption users are strongly encouraged to upgrade.
Acknowledgements
The Cilium community has worked together with members of Cure53 and Isovalent to prepare these mitigations. Special thanks to @NikAleksandrov and @pchaigno for their work on remediating the issue. Thanks to Marsh Ray, Senior Software Developer at Microsoft, for input and guidance on the fix.
For more information
If you have any questions or comments about this advisory, please reach out on Slack.
As usual, if you think you found a related vulnerability, we strongly encourage you to report security vulnerabilities to our private security mailing list: security@cilium.io - first, before disclosing them in any public forums. This is a private mailing list where only members of the Cilium internal security team are subscribed to, and is treated as top priority.
The vulnerability can be exploited over a local network, such as Wi-Fi. It is difficult for an attacker to exploit this vulnerability and may require special conditions. An attacker does not need any special privileges or access rights. No user interaction is needed for the attacker to exploit this vulnerability. The vulnerability can affect other systems as well, not just the initial system. There is a high impact on the confidentiality of the information. There is a high impact on the integrity of the data.
Exploitation activity has been observed. Apply available patches or mitigations urgently.
The exploit probability is very low. The vulnerability is unlikely to be exploited in the next 30 days.
We did not find any exploit available. Neither in GitHub repositories nor in the Exploit-Database.
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