CVE-2025-23028
DoS in Cilium agent DNS proxy from crafted DNS responses
Description
Cilium is a networking, observability, and security solution with an eBPF-based dataplane. A denial of service vulnerability affects versions 1.14.0 through 1.14.7, 1.15.0 through 1.15.11, and 1.16.0 through 1.16.4. In a Kubernetes cluster where Cilium is configured to proxy DNS traffic, an attacker can crash Cilium agents by sending a crafted DNS response to workloads from outside the cluster. For traffic that is allowed but without using DNS-based policy, the dataplane will continue to pass traffic as configured at the time of the DoS. For workloads that have DNS-based policy configured, existing connections may continue to operate, and new connections made without relying on DNS resolution may continue to be established, but new connections which rely on DNS resolution may be disrupted. Any configuration changes that affect the impacted agent may not be applied until the agent is able to restart. This issue is fixed in Cilium v1.14.18, v1.15.12, and v1.16.5. No known workarounds are available.
How to fix CVE-2025-23028
To remediate CVE-2025-23028, upgrade the affected package to a fixed version below.
- —upgrade to 1.16.5 or later
- —upgrade to 1.16.5 or later
- —upgrade to 1.16.5 or later
- —upgrade to 1.14.18 or later
- —upgrade to 1.14.18 or later
Is CVE-2025-23028 being exploited?
Low — EPSS is 0.1%, meaning exploitation activity has not been observed at scale.
Affected packages (5)
- >= 1.15.4, < 1.16.5
- >= 1.15.4, < 1.16.5
- >= 1.14.0, < 1.16.5
- >= 1.14.0, < 1.14.18
- >= 1.14.0, < 1.14.18, >= 1.15.0, < 1.15.12, >= 1.16.0, < 1.16.5
CVSS scores
| Source | Version | Severity | Vector |
|---|---|---|---|
| osv | CVSS 3.1 | MEDIUM5.3 | CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L |