The vulnerability allows injection of arbitrary nginx configuration through the nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target annotation in ingress-nginx. This injection can result in code that runs with the same privileges as the ingress-nginx controller and can also expose cluster‑wide Secrets accessible to the controller, representing a serious confidentiality and integrity breach. The weakness is a classic input validation flaw (CWE-20).

The issue affects deployments of the Kubernetes ingress-nginx controller. No specific version details are supplied, so all copies that include the vulnerable rewrite‑target annotation handler are susceptible until a fix is applied and the controller is updated to a secure release.

With a CVSS score of 8.8 the vulnerability is considered high severity. The EPSS score lists a probability of exploitation below 1 %, indicating that the risk of exploitation in the wild is currently low, and the issue is not flagged in the CISA KEV catalog. The likely attack vector requires the ability to create or modify Ingress resources containing the rewrite‑target annotation, so an attacker would need cluster RBAC privileges or compromised credentials that allow that level of access. An attacker with that capability can inject malicious configuration into nginx, execute arbitrary code, and leak Secrets.