GHSA-qmvj-4qr9-v547
MEDIUMKnative Serving vulnerable to attacker-controlled pod causing denial of service of autoscaler
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.
Blast Radius
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 | 0.39.0 |
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. O3's reachability analysis confirms whether the vulnerable code path is actually invoked in your application, so you act on real exposure instead of every transitive match.
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 GHSA-qmvj-4qr9-v547 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 pinpoints whether GHSA-qmvj-4qr9-v547 is reachable in your code and exactly where to fix it, then blocks exploitation in production at runtime until the patched version is deployed.
Tailored to GHSA-qmvj-4qr9-v547. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-qmvj-4qr9-v547 in your dependencies?
O3 detects GHSA-qmvj-4qr9-v547 across Go dependencies and uses function-level reachability to confirm whether the vulnerable code path is actually reachable — not just present. No false positives.