CVE-2026-94197 NGINX Ingress Controller vulnerability
Attackers can bypass authentication in NGINX Ingress Controller by spoofing headers when ExternalAuth is enabled, gaining unauthorized access to protected paths.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- None listed
What is CVE-2026-94197?
CVE-2026-94197 is a high-severity authentication bypass vulnerability in F5 NGINX Ingress Controller, published on 14 Oct 2026. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.
Official description
An authentication and authorization bypass vulnerability exists in F5 NGINX Kubernetes Ingress Controller (NIC) when configured with the `ExternalAuth` policy or Ingress external authentication. Client-supplied X-Forwarded-Prefix, X-Forwarded-URI, X-Original-URI, and X-Forwarded-Method routing and method headers are forwarded unsanitized into the internal authentication subrequest (handled by the NGINX auth_request directive). As a result, an unauthenticated, remote attacker may spoof request attributes evaluated by the external authentication provider.
Impact: This vulnerability may allow remote attackers
unauthenticated
access to protected
paths. There is no control plane exposure; this is a data plane issue only.
Note: Software versions which have reached End of Technical Support (EoTS) are not evaluated.
Weakness: CWE-290
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-94197?
How do I fix CVE-2026-94197?
No fix has been published for CVE-2026-94197 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Upgrade, and rotate credentials and sessions that may have been exposed. More about Authentication bypass.
Is CVE-2026-94197 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-94197 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as GHSA-5m5m-935w-8wj6.