In Cilium, packets from terminating endpoints may not be encrypted in Wireguard-enabled clusters

CVE-2025-32793 → View on GitHub ↗ View on CVE.org ↗ View on NVD ↗

Description

Impact

When using Wireguard transparent encryption in a Cilium cluster, packets that originate from a terminating endpoint can leave the source node without encryption due to a race condition in how traffic is processed by Cilium.

Patches

This issue has been patched in https://github.com/cilium/cilium/pull/38592.

This issue affects:

  • Cilium v1.15 between v1.15.0 and v1.15.15 inclusive
  • Cilium v1.16 between v1.16.0 and v1.16.8 inclusive
  • Cilium v1.17 between v1.17.0 and v1.17.2 inclusive

This issue is fixed in:

  • Cilium v1.15.16
  • Cilium v1.16.9
  • Cilium v1.17.3

Workarounds

There is no workaround to this issue.

Acknowledgements

The Cilium community has worked together with members of Isovalent to prepare these mitigations. Special thanks to @gandro and @pippolo84 for reporting this issue and to @julianwiedmann for the patch.

For more information

If you think you have found a vulnerability affecting Cilium, we strongly encourage you to report it to our security mailing list at [email protected]. This is a private mailing list for the Cilium security team, and your report will be treated as top priority.

Basic information

Type
reviewed
Severity
medium
Advisory on GitHub
Open advisory ↗
Repository advisory
Open repository advisory ↗
Source code
Browse source ↗
Published (advisory)
2025-04-21 16:17:49 UTC
Updated
2025-04-23 14:41:21 UTC
GitHub reviewed
2025-04-21 16:17:49 UTC
NVD published
2025-04-21

EPSS Score

Score Percentile
0.03% 6.71%

CVSS Scores

Base score Version Severity Vector
4.0 3.1 —
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:L/I:N/A:N Click to expand
Attack vector (AV:N)
Could be attacked over the internet or any normal routed network—not just someone sitting at the machine.
Attack complexity (AC:H)
Even with access, the exploit needs extra luck, timing, or a fussy environment to actually work.
Privileges required (PR:N)
No account or special rights needed—anonymous or random user is enough.
User interaction (UI:N)
Nobody has to click “OK” or open a trap file; it can work without a victim helping.
Scope (S:C)
Breaking this can reach past the original component and bite other resources—bigger blast radius.
Confidentiality (C:L)
Some sensitive info could get out, but not a total data dump.
Integrity (I:N)
Data isn’t meaningfully altered or forged.
Availability (A:N)
Service keeps running; no real outage angle.

Identifiers

Type Value
GHSA GHSA-5vxx-c285-pcq4 ↗
CVE CVE-2025-32793 ↗

CWEs

CWE id Name
CWE-319 Cleartext Transmission of Sensitive Information
CWE-362 Concurrent Execution using Shared Resource with Improper Synchronization ('Race Condition')

Credits

  • julianwiedmann (remediation_developer)

Affected packages (3)

Vulnerable version ranges and first patched releases as published by GitHub.

Ecosystem Package Vulnerable range First patched Vulnerable functions
go github.com/cilium/cilium >= 1.13.0, < 1.15.16 1.15.16 —
go github.com/cilium/cilium >= 1.16.0, < 1.16.9 1.16.9 —
go github.com/cilium/cilium >= 1.17.0, < 1.17.3 1.17.3 —

References

cvelogic Threat Intelligence