CVE-2026-56743

Impact

Standard Kubernetes NetworkPolicy specifications using CIDR-based ipBlock rules without pod or namespace selectors erroneously generate a wildcard namespace allow rule under specific cluster configurations.

When Cilium deployment is configured with a specific custom clusterName (rather than the default "any" value), the parser incorrectly instantiates a pod selector on selectorless peer definitions. This leads to Cilium appending an unintended wildcard namespace label selector to the policy's allowed Layer 3 rules, which allows traffic from other workloads in the same namespace as the subject of the policy.

Example policy affected by this issue:

apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: NetworkPolicy
metadata:
  name: test-server
  namespace: default
spec:
  podSelector:
    matchLabels:
      app: test-server
  policyTypes:
  - Ingress
  ingress:
  - from:
    - ipBlock:
        cidr: 192.0.2.3

In affected versions, this policy erroneously allows the test-server Pod in the default namespace to receive any traffic from other workloads running in the default namespace.

Patches

This issue has been patched in:

• Cilium v1.19.5

Releases below v1.19.0 are not affected.

This issue affects:

• Cilium v1.19 between v1.19.0 and v1.19.4 inclusive

Workarounds

Developers can create the equivalent policy using CiliumNetworkPolicy fromCIDR expressions. CiliumNetworkPolicy and CiliumClusterwideNetworkPolicy are not affected by this issue.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to @TheBeeZee for reporting this issue and preparing the fix, and to @fristonio and @odinuge for their assistance in reviewing the solution.

For more information

If a vulnerability affecting Cilium appears to have been found, the Cilium security team strongly encourages reporting it to the security mailing list at security@cilium.io. This is a private mailing list for the Cilium security team, and the report will be treated as top priority.