Vulnerability · Published Oct 27, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M

CVE-2026-54462knative.dev/pkg admission webhooks allow unbounded request-body memory exhaustion

Medium 6.5

In plain English

A medium-severity resource allocation without limits in pkg from knative. Proof-of-concept exploit code is public. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.4% (higher than 32% of all known vulnerabilities). Fixed versions are available - upgrade the affected package.

Severity (CVSS 3.1)6.5Medium
Exploit odds (30 days)0.4%top 68.3% of all CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: poc
Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

Knative pkg provides common packages shared across Knative repositories. Prior to 0.0.0-20260531000007-52dbd5ece63f, the knative.dev/pkg/webhook admissionHandler in webhook/admission.go decodes an attacker-supplied AdmissionReview through json.NewDecoder(io.TeeReader(r.Body, &bodyBuffer)) under an http.HandlerFunc without an http.MaxBytesReader or equivalent body-size limit. A pod-network client can send one oversized POST to an admission webhook, causing the decoder and bodyBuffer to retain amplified copies of the request until the controller pod exhausts memory and is OOM-killed. Every downstream consumer using the shared webhook server inherits the vulnerable behavior, including Knative, Tekton, KEDA, Sigstore policy-controller, and Kpack. For consumers configured with failurePolicy=Fail, loss of the controller can interrupt admission; with failurePolicy=Ignore, the affected webhook is unavailable while other admissions continue. This issue is fixed in version 0.0.0-20260531000007-52dbd5ece63f.

Affected packages & fixed versions

EcosystemPackageFixed inAdvisory
Goknative.dev/pkg0.0.0-20260531000007-52dbd5ece63fGHSA-2hw4-c9m4-f2fj
Goknative.dev/pkg0.0.0-20260531000007-52dbd5ece63fGO-2026-6880

Affected products (as reported)

VendorProductVersions
knative pkg < 0.0.0-20260531000007-52dbd5ece63f

Weakness: CWE-770 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

References