Finding NGINX Ingress Controllers with runZero

Today, three vulnerabilities in the NGINX Ingress Controller for Kubernetes were disclosed, as described in this article from The Hacker News. These vulnerabilities have CVSS scores ranging from 7.6 to 8.8; all of these scores are considered high.

These vulnerabilities have been designated as CVE-2022-4886, CVE-2023-5043, and CVE-2023-5044. Successful exploitation of one of these vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary commands or steal the credentials of the ingress-nginx controller. In the default configuration, that credential has access to all secrets in the cluster.

What is the impact? #

Upon successful exploitation, depending on configuration, attackers may be able to execute arbitrary commands or retrieve arbitrary infomration (including secrets) from the vulnerable service.

Are updates or workarounds available? #

As of October 30th, 2023, mitigations for each vulnerability are available and documented via disclosures from the ingress-nginx project on GitHub:

• Mitigation for CVE-2022-4886
• Mitigation for CVE-2023-5043
• Mitigation for CVE-2023-5044

How do I find potentially vulnerable NGINX Ingress Controllers with runZero? #

From the Services Inventory, use the following query to locate assets running the NGINX Ingress Controller in your network that expose a web interface and which may need remediation or mitigation:

product:"NGINX Ingress Controller"

Note that this identification is based on the usage of the default NGINX Ingress Controller TLS (X.509) certificate. If a different certificate is used, detection may not work as expected. Further research into fingerprinting this software is ongoing.

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