cert-manager(v1.18.3): Enhanced Certificate Handling, Smarter Issuer Reconciliation, and Improved Diagnostics

📋 Recommended Actions ✅ No Immediate Action Required No immediate action required. This release primarily provides stability and quality-of-life improvements. Review the updates to leverage enhanced certificate handling and improve your troubleshooting experience. 📝 Summary cert-manager(v1.18.3) boosts reliability and user experience. It now supports significantly larger certificates and chains, crucial for complex deployments with many SANs. A critical fix prevents unnecessary certificate re-issuance stemming from IssuerRef defaulting. Plus, clearer error messages for malformed PEM data greatly simplify troubleshooting. Upgrade for a more stable and robust certificate management experience. ...

October 15, 2025 · Daniel Grenemark

cert-manager(v1.17.4): Critical Fix for URI Name Constraints Ensures Correct Certificate Issuance

📋 Recommended Actions ⚠️ Action Required Immediate upgrade recommended to ensure certificate name constraints are correctly applied, enhancing the security and validity of issued certificates. cert-manager v1.17.4 is a targeted patch release addressing a critical bug in how URI name constraints are applied during certificate signing request (CSR) generation. Previously, Permitted.URIDomains were incorrectly treated as excluded, potentially leading to misconfigurations in certificate issuance policies. This fix ensures that your defined URI name constraints are honored as intended, bolstering the integrity and security of your issued certificates. ...

July 2, 2025 · Daniel Grenemark

cert-manager(v1.18.2): Key RBAC Reversion and Name Constraints Correction

📋 Recommended Actions ⚠️ Action Required Immediate review of your cert-manager Helm chart deployment is required due to a significant RBAC reversion. Users relying on the ‘disableHTTPChallengesRole’ flag must update their manifests. Review the certificate name constraints fix to ensure correct certificate issuance. 📝 Summary cert-manager v1.18.2 lands with critical updates, most notably a significant reversion of RBAC changes introduced in v1.18.1. This patch release removes the global.rbac.disableHTTPChallengesRole Helm value, consolidating HTTP-01 and DNS-01 challenge-related ClusterRoles into a single, unified controller role. If your deployments relied on disableHTTPChallengesRole to limit permissions, you must immediately review and update your Helm manifests. This reversion effectively means that HTTP-01 challenge permissions, such as creating pods and services, are now always included within the primary challenge controller role, potentially granting broader permissions than you previously configured or intended. Beyond RBAC, this release also delivers a crucial bug fix. It corrects an issue where certificate name constraints for URI domains were being mistakenly interpreted as ExcludedURIDomains instead of PermittedURIDomains in generated Certificate Signing Requests. This fix ensures that your certificates are issued with the exact URI name constraints you specify, preventing unexpected validation failures. Operations engineers should promptly examine their Helm values and RBAC configurations to prevent unintended permission shifts and ensure correct certificate issuance behavior. ...

July 2, 2025 · Daniel Grenemark

cert-manager(v1.18.1): Enhanced ACME Challenge Security and Ingress-Nginx Compatibility

📋 Recommended Actions ✅ No Immediate Action Required No immediate action required. Review updates to better support your users, especially around ACME HTTP01 challenge handling and Ingress-Nginx compatibility. 📝 Summary cert-manager v1.18.1 delivers critical enhancements for ACME HTTP01 challenges and improved compatibility with Ingress-Nginx. This release introduces the ACMEHTTP01IngressPathTypeExact feature gate, now Beta and enabled by default, which switches the Ingress pathType to Exact for heightened security. This prevents misinterpretations of challenge paths and aligns with standard Ingress behaviors. A significant dependency upgrade bumps Ingress-Nginx to v1.12.3, coupled with a vital configuration change that disables strict-validate-path-type to prevent HTTP01 challenge failures caused by a bug in newer Ingress-Nginx versions. Furthermore, the ACME authorization timeout is extended from 20 seconds to 2 minutes, significantly improving reliability for challenges against slower ACME servers or under poor network conditions. The DefaultPrivateKeyRotationPolicyAlways feature gate is also promoted to Beta, ensuring consistent private key rotation. Review these changes to ensure optimal ACME challenge resolution and cluster stability. ...

June 18, 2025 · Daniel Grenemark

cert-manager(v1.17.3): Enhanced ACME Challenge Stability and Updated Ingress-Nginx Compatibility

📋 Recommended Actions ✅ No Immediate Action Required No immediate action required. Review updates for improved ACME challenge stability and awareness of updated Ingress-Nginx testing within cert-manager’s ecosystem. This cert-manager v1.17.3 patch release focuses on enhancing the reliability of certificate issuance and ensuring robust compatibility with other crucial Kubernetes ecosystem components. You’ll find a significant increase in the ACME challenge authorization timeout, which should lead to more successful certificate requests, particularly in environments with network latency or slower DNS propagation. Additionally, our end-to-end testing environment has been updated to use a newer ingress-nginx version with its admission webhook enabled, reinforcing cert-manager’s compatibility with modern ingress configurations. ...

June 17, 2025 · Daniel Grenemark

cert-manager(v1.17.2): Crucial Security Patches and Dependency Refresh

📋 Recommended Actions ⚠️ Action Required Immediate patching is highly recommended to address several security vulnerabilities in core dependencies and ensure the continued stability of your cert-manager deployments. This cert-manager v1.17.2 release delivers vital security updates by patching multiple Go dependencies that address various CVEs. Beyond these critical fixes, we’ve also refreshed our Go toolchain and base images, ensuring a more robust and secure foundation for your certificate management needs. ...

April 24, 2025 · Daniel Grenemark

cert-manager(v1.17.1): Critical Cloudflare DNS01 Challenge Fix and Go Toolchain Update

📋 Recommended Actions ⚠️ Action Required Immediate upgrade recommended for all users relying on Cloudflare DNS01 challenges to restore functionality and ensure uninterrupted certificate issuance. This cert-manager v1.17.1 patch release delivers a crucial fix for users leveraging Cloudflare DNS01 challenges. Due to a recent breaking API change from Cloudflare, cert-manager v1.17.0 and earlier versions were experiencing issues with certificate issuance via this method. This update ensures seamless operation for your ACME certificates, alongside a standard bump to the Go toolchain to v1.23.6. ...

February 13, 2025 · Daniel Grenemark

cert-manager(v1.17.0): Name Constraints & Domain Qualified Finalizers Mature to Beta, Literal Keystore Passwords, and CA Injector Merging

📋 Recommended Actions ⚠️ Action Required Immediate action is not universally required but highly recommended to review the default changes for promoted feature gates (like NameConstraints and UseDomainQualifiedFinalizer now defaulting to true) and the deprecation of ValidateCAA (now defaulting to false). Adjust your configurations as necessary to maintain desired behavior, especially if you rely on the previous implicit defaults. Consider leveraging the new literal keystore password option for simplified management. ...

February 3, 2025 · Daniel Grenemark