NGINX Gateway Fabric has a vulnerability when it renders the spec.basic.realm (and spec.jwt.realm) field of a namespaced AuthenticationFilter verbatim, unescaped and unvalidated, into the shared data-plane nginx.conf as auth_basic \"<realm>\";. A namespaced authenticated attacker that configures AuthenticationFilter CRD to an HTTPRoute/GRPCRoute on a shared Gateway can craft a realm value that closes the quoted directive and the enclosing location {} block and injects arbitrary NGINX directives into that Gateway's data-plane config.
Impact
A remote authenticated attacker can send crafted requests to configure NGINX Gateway Fabric AuthenticationFilter CRD and may be able to read every co-located tenant's mounted secrets, SSRF via proxy_pass, reading the pod ServiceAccount token, or hijacking other tenants' routes. There is no data plane exposure; this is a control plane issue only.\n\n
\n\n\nNote: Software versions which have reached End of Technical Support (EoTS) are not evaluated."
}
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"value": "Description\n\nNGINX Gateway Fabric has a vulnerability when it renders the spec.basic.realm (and spec.jwt.realm) field of a namespaced AuthenticationFilter verbatim, unescaped and unvalidated, into the shared data-plane nginx.conf as auth_basic \"\";. A namespaced authenticated attacker that configures AuthenticationFilter CRD to an HTTPRoute/GRPCRoute on a shared Gateway can craft a realm value that closes the quoted directive and the enclosing location {} block and injects arbitrary NGINX directives into that Gateway's data-plane config. \n\nImpact\n\nA remote authenticated attacker can send crafted requests to configure NGINX Gateway Fabric AuthenticationFilter CRD and may be able to read every co-located tenant's mounted secrets, SSRF via proxy_pass, reading the pod ServiceAccount token, or hijacking other tenants' routes. There is no data plane exposure; this is a control plane issue only.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nNote: Software versions which have reached End of Technical Support (EoTS) are not evaluated."
}
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As this attack is conducted by authenticated users with Kubernetes Role-based Access Control (RBAC) write access to AuthenticationFilter CRD and Secrets, the only complete mitigation is to restrict that access to fully trusted administrators only.
"
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"value": "As this attack is conducted by authenticated users with Kubernetes Role-based Access Control (RBAC) write access to AuthenticationFilter CRD and Secrets, the only complete mitigation is to restrict that access to fully trusted administrators only."
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