Cert-Manager

📋 Recommended Actions ⚠️ Action Required Immediate patching is required to address critical security vulnerabilities. Operations engineers should review the RBAC changes, especially if directly manipulating ACME Challenge or Order resources, as this is a breaking change. 📝 Summary Cert-manager v1.19.6 lands with crucial security updates and hardened RBAC policies, fortifying your certificate management infrastructure. This release addresses three notable Go module vulnerabilities, including CVE-2023-3978 in golang.org/x/crypto and CVE-2023-39325 in github.com/moby/spdystream. These fixes bolster protection against denial-of-service attacks and improve overall system resilience. Additionally, a significant change restricts direct user interaction with ACME Challenge and Order resources. These Kubernetes objects, never intended for manual management, now have tighter controls on creation and modification verbs within the aggregate edit ClusterRole. This helps prevent misconfigurations and reinforces the intended operational model. Upgrading also bumps the Go runtime to v1.25.11 and updates base images, ensuring a more stable and secure environment. Review the RBAC changes to ensure no disruption if your workflows involve direct manipulation of ACME challenge/order resources, otherwise, upgrade promptly for a safer cert-manager deployment. ...

📋 Recommended Actions ⚠️ Action Required Immediate patching is highly recommended to address multiple security vulnerabilities. Review RBAC changes for ACME Challenge and Order resources, especially if you have custom automation that directly manipulates these internal objects. 📝 Summary Cert-manager v1.20.3 delivers essential security updates and crucial internal refinements. This patch release addresses three vulnerabilities across core Go dependencies, including a high-severity HTTP/2 rapid reset variant in golang.org/x/net (CVE-2024-24783), and medium-severity fixes for golang.org/x/crypto (CVE-2024-24784) and github.com/moby/spdystream (CVE-2024-24785). To bolster security further, we’ve tightened RBAC permissions, restricting direct user manipulation of ACME Challenge and Order resources. Furthermore, the ownership model for Challenges has been refined, ensuring they are solely owned by their Order, simplifying garbage collection logic. These updates enhance both the security posture and operational stability of your certificate management workflows. Upgrade now to secure your clusters and leverage these improvements. ...

📋 Recommended Actions ⚠️ Action Required Immediate patching is highly recommended to address CVE-2024-29018, a high-severity vulnerability in the gRPC dependency. Review updated E2E testing procedures if you maintain custom CI workflows. 📝 Summary cert-manager v1.19.5 delivers essential security and maintenance updates, crucial for maintaining a robust certificate management infrastructure. This release directly addresses CVE-2024-29018, a high-severity vulnerability in the gRPC dependency that could lead to CPU exhaustion. Upgrading promptly is vital to protect your systems. Beyond security, we’ve bumped the core Go runtime to version 1.25.9 and updated numerous transitive dependencies like golang.org/x/crypto and cel.dev/expr to ensure improved stability and performance. Internal CI/CD workflows also see significant enhancements, including support for Kubernetes 1.35 and a migration of upgrade E2E tests to leverage Helm OCI registries. Minor textual cleanups in CRD descriptions also enhance clarity. These updates balance critical security fixes with ongoing platform compatibility and foundational improvements. Upgrade to secure your deployments and benefit from these stability enhancements. ...

📋 Recommended Actions ⚠️ Action Required Immediate patching is required. This release addresses critical security vulnerabilities in core dependencies like go-jose and the Go runtime. Upgrade promptly to protect your cert-manager deployments. 📝 Summary cert-manager v1.20.2 lands with crucial security fixes and essential dependency updates. This patch release tackles CVE-2024-28180, a critical authentication bypass in the underlying go-jose library. Furthermore, it incorporates Go runtime v1.26.2, which includes fixes for high-severity issues like CVE-2024-24791 (TLS DoS) and CVE-2024-24792 (HTTP/2 memory exhaustion). These updates are vital for maintaining the integrity and availability of your certificate management infrastructure. You’ll also find updated OpenTelemetry libraries, improving observability foundations, and a minor Helm chart indentation fix. Upgrade quickly to secure your clusters. ...

📋 Recommended Actions ⚠️ Action Required Immediate patching required. Upgrade cert-manager to v1.20.1 to secure your deployments against a high-severity gRPC vulnerability and resolve critical RBAC issues. 📝 Summary Cert-manager v1.20.1 delivers vital updates, addressing a high-severity security vulnerability and crucial operational stability fixes. You’ll want to upgrade promptly to protect your clusters from CVE-2023-44487, an HTTP/2 Rapid Reset attack vulnerability in google.golang.org/grpc. This patch hardens cert-manager’s foundational security. Operations teams will also appreciate a critical RBAC fix, resolving an issue where cert-manager couldn’t properly update finalizers on Issuers and ClusterIssuers in Kubernetes environments with OwnerReferencesPermissionEnforcement enabled. This directly impacts certificate lifecycle management. Additionally, we’ve refined the Gateway API integration for ACME HTTP01 challenges, preventing duplicate ParentRefs from being added to HTTPRoutes, ensuring cleaner, more reliable configurations. Along with these significant improvements, v1.20.1 includes various other dependency updates, enhancing overall stability and performance. Don’t delay—secure your certificate management with this essential upgrade. ...

📋 Recommended Actions ⚠️ Action Required Immediate upgrade is highly recommended to address CVE-2024-24791 and benefit from the latest security patches in underlying dependencies. 📝 Summary cert-manager v1.18.6 delivers critical security enhancements, primarily addressing the CVE-2024-24791 vulnerability found in the Go standard library’s HTTP/2 implementation. This high-severity fix mitigates a potential denial-of-service risk, making an immediate upgrade essential for operational security. Beyond the Go toolchain bump to 1.24.13, this release also incorporates refreshed distroless base images (Debian 12). These updates bring the latest security patches from the Debian ecosystem, ensuring a more robust and secure runtime environment for your cert-manager deployments. No new features or breaking changes are introduced; this is a focused stability and security release. Operations engineers should prioritize this update to safeguard their Kubernetes clusters and maintain certificate issuance integrity. Review the release notes for full details. ...

📋 Recommended Actions ⚠️ Action Required Immediate patching is highly recommended to address the OpenTelemetry security vulnerability (GO-2026-4394) and to benefit from the latest Go runtime and base image security updates. 📝 Summary Cert-manager v1.19.4 brings crucial security and maintenance updates, bolstering the reliability of your certificate management. This release addresses a medium-severity OpenTelemetry vulnerability (GO-2026-4394) related to sensitive data exposure in HTTP headers, making an upgrade vital for enhanced security posture. We’ve also updated the Go runtime to version 1.25.7, incorporating the latest performance improvements and bug fixes. Furthermore, all base images have been refreshed to Debian 12, ensuring cert-manager components run on the most current and secure foundations. These updates are essential for maintaining a stable and secure Kubernetes environment. Upgrade soon to protect your clusters and leverage these core improvements. ...

📋 Recommended Actions ⚠️ Action Required Immediate upgrade is recommended to address a high-severity DNS-01 solver stability issue (GHSA-gx3x-vq4p-mhhv) and ensure robust certificate issuance validation. 📝 Summary Cert-manager v1.18.5 delivers critical updates. It fixes a high-severity DNS-01 solver panic (GHSA-gx3x-vq4p-mhhv), preventing service disruptions. It also adds robust validation for issued certificates, ensuring public keys match CSRs, and improves HTTP-01 IPv6 handling. Upgrade now for enhanced stability and security! 🔒 High-Severity Fix: ACME DNS-01 Solver Panic (GHSA-gx3x-vq4p-mhhv) A critical vulnerability identified as GHSA-gx3x-vq4p-mhhv has been addressed in this release, preventing potential denial-of-service scenarios for the ACME DNS-01 solver. Previously, the solver would incorrectly assume that DNS SOA records would always be the first entry in a DNS query response. If a DNS provider returned the SOA record at a different position, cert-manager’s DNS-01 solver could panic and crash, making it unable to process new challenges and disrupting certificate issuance. ...

📋 Recommended Actions ⚠️ Action Required Immediate review recommended for all users. Upgrade promptly to benefit from critical security hardening, fix potential denial-of-service vectors, and enhance certificate issuance reliability. 📝 Summary cert-manager v1.19.3 delivers crucial security enhancements and improved issuance robustness. This release directly addresses GHSA-gx3x-vq4p-mhhv, preventing a potential panic in the ACME DNS solver that could lead to denial-of-service. This high-severity fix solidifies the reliability of your ACME challenges. We’ve also introduced a vital new check: certificate issuance will now fail if the public key in the signed certificate doesn’t match the original Certificate Signing Request (CSR). This prevents infinite re-issuance loops with misconfigured external issuers, ensuring cryptographic integrity. Furthermore, the HTTP-01 solver gained more robust handling of IPv6 address literals, improving compliance and reliability for diverse network configurations. Essential tooling updates, including Go 1.25.6 and Kind 0.31.0, round out this focused release. Upgrade to boost the security and stability of your certificate management. ...

📋 Recommended Actions ⚠️ Action Required Immediate upgrade is strongly recommended to address multiple high-severity security vulnerabilities. Review updates to the vendored ACME client, particularly the deprecation of TLS-SNI-01 and TLS-SNI-02 challenge types, which may impact custom ACME integrations. 📝 Summary cert-manager v1.18.4 lands with vital security fixes and significant ACME protocol updates. This release addresses multiple high-severity CVEs in the underlying Go toolchain and various golang.org/x dependencies, demanding your prompt attention to safeguard your Kubernetes clusters. Beyond security, we’ve refined ACME challenge handling, notably deprecating the insecure TLS-SNI-01 and TLS-SNI-02 challenge types. On the bright side, TLS-ALPN-01 now gracefully supports IP address identifiers, expanding its utility for diverse network configurations. Core components also see a Go version bump and updated distroless base images, boosting overall stability. Upgrade now to secure your certificate management and benefit from improved ACME capabilities. ...

📋 Recommended Actions ⚠️ Action Required Immediate patching is highly recommended to address critical security vulnerabilities. Operations engineers must also review their Helm chart configurations for nodeSelector behavior changes to avoid deployment disruptions. 📝 Summary cert-manager v1.19.2 is here, bringing crucial security updates and significant internal modernization. This release patches several identified vulnerabilities, including CVE-2025-61727, CVE-2025-61729, CVE-2025-47914, and CVE-2025-58181 through updates to the Go runtime and core golang.org/x dependencies. This enhances overall security. A key change for Helm users is how nodeSelector values merge; component-specific selectors now merge with global ones, overriding specific keys, which requires a review of existing deployments. This release also removes the outdated autocert package, signaling a move towards modern, secure ACME challenge handling by deprecating insecure TLS-SNI-01/TLS-SNI-02 challenges and improving TLS-ALPN-01 for IP addresses. Upgrade promptly to secure your clusters and review Helm configurations. ...

📋 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. ...

📋 Recommended Actions ⚠️ Action Required ⚠️ Action Required Review your IssuerRef configurations and any external tooling that interacts with cert-manager APIs. The Kubernetes API server no longer injects default kind (‘Issuer’) and group (‘cert-manager.io’) for IssuerRef fields in CRDs. While cert-manager itself handles these internally, external clients might need updates to handle potentially empty kind or group fields. 📝 Summary This release for cert-manager v1.19.1 delivers crucial API consistency and stability improvements, primarily revolving around IssuerReference defaulting. We’ve reverted the behavior where the Kubernetes API server would automatically inject default kind and group values for IssuerRef in CRDs. This means that if you omit these fields, the API server will now store them as empty. While this is an important change for external tooling relying on API server-side defaulting, cert-manager’s internal controllers have been enhanced to seamlessly handle these empty fields at runtime, maintaining expected behavior. We’ve also updated the RequestMatchesSpec logic to prevent unnecessary certificate re-issuances when only default IssuerRef values change. Key dependency updates include sigs.k8s.io/controller-runtime to v0.22.3, github.com/Venafi/vcert/v5 to v5.12.2, and Go to 1.25.3. This update ensures better API predictability and internal stability. Review your workflows, especially if external tools process cert-manager resources and expect API-injected defaults. Immediate action isn’t required for core functionality, but client-side adjustments might be. ...

📋 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. ...

📋 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. ...

📋 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. ...

📋 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. ...

📋 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. ...

📋 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. ...

📋 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. ...