CVE-2025-48056 is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.3) CWE-74 vulnerability in github.com/cilium/hubble. A fix is available for github.com/cilium/hubble — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Hubble CLI vulnerable to character injection
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- 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-2025-48056.
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-2025-48056 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 377,636 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
github.com/cilium/hubbleReal-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
Impact
A network attacker could inject malicious control characters into Hubble CLI terminal output, potentially leading to loss of integrity and manipulation of the output. This could be leveraged to conceal log entries, rewrite output, or even make the terminal temporarily unusable. Exploitation of this attack would require the victim to be monitoring Kafka traffic using Layer 7 Protocol Visibility at the time of the attack.
Patches
This issue affects all versions of Hubble CLI before v1.17.2. The issue is patched in Hubble CLI v1.17.2, via https://github.com/cilium/cilium/pull/37401.
Workarounds
Hubble CLI users who are unable to upgrade can direct their Hubble flows to a log file and inspect the output within a text editor.
Acknowledgements
The Cilium community has worked together with members of Isovalent and the Cisco ASIG team to prepare these mitigations. Special thanks to @bipierce-cisco and @kokelley-cisco for reporting the issue and to @devodev for the fix.
For more information
If you have any questions or comments about this advisory, please reach out on Slack.
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.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐹Go | github.com/cilium/hubble | all versions | 1.17.2go get github.com/cilium/hubble@v1.17.2 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for github.com/cilium/hubble, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update github.com/cilium/hubble to 1.17.2 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2025-48056 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-2025-48056 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2025-48056. 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-2025-48056 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2025-48056 across Go dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.