CVE-2025-47281
Kyverno's Improper JMESPath Variable Evaluation Leads to Denial of Service
Description
Kyverno is a policy engine designed for cloud native platform engineering teams. In versions 1.14.1 and below, a Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability exists due to improper handling of JMESPath variable substitutions. Attackers with permissions to create or update Kyverno policies can craft expressions using the {{@}} variable combined with a pipe and an invalid JMESPath function (e.g., {{@ | non_existent_function }}). This leads to a nil value being substituted into the policy structure. Subsequent processing by internal functions, specifically getValueAsStringMap, which expect string values, results in a panic due to a type assertion failure (interface {} is nil, not string). This crashes Kyverno worker threads in the admission controller and causes continuous crashes of the reports controller pod. This is fixed in version 1.14.2.
How to fix CVE-2025-47281
To remediate CVE-2025-47281, upgrade the affected package to a fixed version below.
- —upgrade to 1.14.2 or later
- —upgrade to 1.14.2 or later
- —upgrade to 1.14.2 or later
Is CVE-2025-47281 being exploited?
Low — EPSS is 0.1%, meaning exploitation activity has not been observed at scale.
Affected packages (3)
- from 0, < 1.14.2
- from 0, < 1.14.2
- from 0, < 1.14.2
CVSS scores
| Source | Version | Severity | Vector |
|---|---|---|---|
| osv | CVSS 3.1 | HIGH7.7 | CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H |