CVE-2023-48713 is a medium-severity (CVSS 6.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in knative.dev/serving. A fix is available for knative.dev/serving — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Knative Serving vulnerable to attacker-controlled pod causing denial of service of autoscaler
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2023-48713.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2023-48713 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 377,333 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
knative.dev/servingReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects Go packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
Summary
A vulnerability was fond in Knative Serving that could allow an attacker to crash the Knative Serving autoscaler resulting in a denial of service. The attacker would need to have compromised one pod in the Knative Serving deployment, and with that position they could launch the attack against the autoscaler.
When the autoscaler scrapes the metrics of pods, it sends a request to the /metrics endpoint of each pod and reads the response. The attacker would need to detect the request from the autoscaler to the /metrics endpoint of the pod they had compromised and send a malicious response back to the autoscaler. At this point, the autoscaler would crash. The root cause of the vulnerability was a memory exhaustion issue in the autoscaler that the attacker could trigger with the malicious reponse.
The vulnerability would allow a privilege escalation by the attacker from controlling one point to having negative impact on the entire Knative Serving deployment.
Impact
All users are vulnerable to this; Users that have not had any of their pods compromised are not at risk of this vulnerability.
Mitigation
The vulnerability has been patched in v1.10.5, v1.11.3 and v1.12.0
Credits
The vulnerability was reported by Ada Logics during an ongoing security audit of Knative involving Ada Logics, the Knative maintainers, OSTIF and CNCF.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐹Go | knative.dev/serving | all versions | 0.39.0go get knative.dev/serving@v0.39.0 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for knative.dev/serving, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update knative.dev/serving to 0.39.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2023-48713 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2023-48713 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2023-48713. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2023-48713 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2023-48713 across Go dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.