CVE-2026-18675: Kong Inc Kong Mesh

Medium severity, CVSS 5.3. EPSS: 0.6% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

The dataplane token validator in kuma-cp performs an unchecked Go type assertion on the JWT kid header. A token whose kid is a JSON number decodes as a float64 and triggers a runtime panic before any signature, claims, or authorization check runs. The panic terminates the entire kuma-cp process, HTTP API, the health and readiness endpoints, and xDS. Unauthenticated access to the dataplane gRPC server can trigger the crash with a malformed token A single request is a transient interruption; sustaining an outage requires repeated requests.

Affected products

• Kong Inc Kong Mesh: before 2.7.29 (fixed in 2.7.29); from 2.8.0, before 2.9.19 (fixed in 2.9.19); from 2.10.0, before 2.11.18 (fixed in 2.11.18); from 2.12.0, before 2.12.14 (fixed in 2.12.14); from 2.13.0, before 2.13.10 (fixed in 2.13.10); from 2.14.0, before 2.14.2 (fixed in 2.14.2)

Published 2026-08-12. Last modified 2026-08-31.