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 This release also removes the outdated autocert package, signaling a move towards modern, secure ACME challenge handling by deprecating insecure TLS-SNI-01/TLS-SNI-02 challenges and improving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 ⚠️ 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 ✅ 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 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. ...