GHSA-pwqm-x5x6-5586 BIT-cilium-2024-28860 BIT-cilium-operator-2024-28860 BIT-cilium-proxy-2024-28860 BIT-hubble-2024-28860 BIT-hubble-relay-2024-28860 BIT-hubble-ui-2024-28860 BIT-hubble-ui-backend-2024-28860 CVE-2024-28860 GO-2024-2666

Cilium has insecure IPsec transport encryption

Medium Go

Severity: 8.0 / 10; Medium · CVSS 3.1
Exploit chance (EPSS): 0.17%; Chance of exploitation in the next 30 days. Higher than 6.58% of scored vulnerabilities.
Known exploited: No; Not in CISA's catalog
Weakness: CWE-326 Inadequate Encryption Strength
Fix: 1.13.14; Upgrade github.com/cilium/cilium to this version or later

Description

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.

Affected versions

Go

Package	Vulnerable	Fixed in
github.com/cilium/cilium	`>= 1.4.0, < 1.13.14`	`1.13.14`
github.com/cilium/cilium	`>= 1.14.0, < 1.14.9`	`1.14.9`
github.com/cilium/cilium	`>= 1.15.0, < 1.15.3`	`1.15.3`
github.com/cilium/cilium	`< 1.13.14` `>= 1.14.0, < 1.14.9` `>= 1.15.0, < 1.15.3`	`1.13.14` `1.14.9` `1.15.3`

How to fix

Move to the fixed version or later with your package manager, update the lockfile, and run your tests. If the package only arrives through another dependency, upgrade that dependency first. If none of its releases pulls a fixed version yet, force the version with your package manager's override.

github.com/cilium/cilium Go → `1.13.14`

go

go get github.com/cilium/cilium@v1.13.14 && go mod tidy

Severity breakdown

CVSS 3.1 8.0

CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:N

Attack vector: Adjacent
Attack complexity: High
Privileges required: None
User interaction: None
Scope: Changed
Confidentiality: High
Integrity: High
Availability: None

Weakness

CWE-326: Inadequate Encryption Strength

The product stores or transmits sensitive data using an encryption scheme that is theoretically sound, but is not strong enough for the level of protection required.

How to prevent it

Architecture and Design: Use an encryption scheme that is currently considered to be strong by experts in the field.

References

Advisories

nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-28860

Packages

github.com/cilium/cilium

Timeline

Mar 27, 2024 Published
Sep 10, 2026 Last updated by the source
Nov 1, 2026 Latest EPSS score

Advisory	Severity	Why it's related
GHSA-fm8w-2m5w-9j7r Cilium may unexpectedly allow ingress traffic from the local namespace when a Kubernetes NetworkPolicy is configured with an ipBlock match	Medium	Also affects github.com/cilium/cilium
GHSA-w7c2-w76w-5hmj Cilium: Namespaced HTTPRoutes can redirect traffic to other namespaces	High	Also affects github.com/cilium/cilium
GHSA-q6h5-q3q6-f87x CiliumLocalRedirectPolicy addressMatcher allows cross-namespace service traffic hijacking and can break service translation	Medium	Also affects github.com/cilium/cilium
GHSA-3fcv-jvfp-m4q9 Cilium vulnerable to sensitive information disclosure and cluster disruption via local Envoy admin socket access	High	Also affects github.com/cilium/cilium
GHSA-gj49-89wh-h4gj Cillium exposes sensitive information included in the cilium-bugtool debug archive	Medium	Also affects github.com/cilium/cilium
GHSA-hxv8-4j4r-cqgv Cilium L7 proxy may bypass Kubernetes NetworkPolicy for same-node traffic	Medium	Also affects github.com/cilium/cilium
GHSA-5r23-prx4-mqg3 Cilium may not enforce host firewall policies when Native Routing, WireGuard and Node Encryption are enabled	Medium	Also affects github.com/cilium/cilium
GHSA-38pp-6gcp-rqvm Cilium with misconfigured toGroups in policies can lead to unrestricted egress traffic	Medium	Also affects github.com/cilium/cilium

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