CVE-2026-16543 — Kong Operator cluster-wide ingress configuration DoS via embedded KIC CA-certificate ID collision

Description (CNA)

Kong Operator's embedded Kong Kubernetes Ingress Controller (KIC) allows a user with namespace-scoped Secret creation privileges to cause a cluster-wide ingress configuration denial of service. The embedded KIC collects CA-certificate Secrets across all watched namespaces using a label selector alone, without ingress-class or namespace restrictions. The CA-certificate primary key is derived from a user-supplied field in the Secret. Duplicate CA-certificate IDs cause Kong Gateway to reject the entire configuration document and halting all ingress changes cluster-wide.

Affected (CNA)

Vendor / product	Versions
Not supplied / Not supplied	affected 2.2.0 before 2.2.3; affected 2.1.0 before 2.1.9; affected 0 before 2.0.11

CWE

CWE-862, CWE-400

References

https://github.com/Kong/kong-operator/security/advisories/GHSA-h4fh-j7xg-vwcx

ADP enrichment

CISA-ADP

No English description supplied.

No references supplied.