Vulnerability · Published Jul 29, 2026 · Assigned by Kong

CVE-2026-16543Kong Operator cluster-wide ingress configuration DoS via embedded KIC CA-certificate ID collision

High 7.1

In plain English

A high-severity missing authorization in Kong/kong-operator. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.2% (higher than 14% of all known vulnerabilities).

Severity (CVSS 4.0)7.1High

Exploit odds (30 days)0.2%top 86.4% of all CVEs

Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: none

Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

Kong Operator's embedded Kong Kubernetes Ingress Controller (KIC) allows a user with namespace-scoped Secret creation privileges to cause a cluster-wide ingress configuration denial of service. The embedded KIC collects CA-certificate Secrets across all watched namespaces using a label selector alone, without ingress-class or namespace restrictions. The CA-certificate primary key is derived from a user-supplied field in the Secret. Duplicate CA-certificate IDs cause Kong Gateway to reject the entire configuration document and halting all ingress changes cluster-wide.

Affected products (as reported)

Vendor	Product	Versions
	Kong/kong-operator	2.2.0 – before 2.2.32.1.0 – before 2.1.90 – before 2.0.11

Weakness: CWE-862, CWE-400 · Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

References

https://github.com/Kong/kong-operator/security/advisories/GHSA-h4fh-j7xg-vwcx