Introduction
An attacker who can kill processes in every Kubernetes pod can take down applications in a production cluster immediately. Teams running Chaos Mesh for chaos engineering should know about a recent vulnerability that lets attackers abuse a debugging interface to cause a cluster-wide denial of service.
About Chaos Mesh: Chaos Mesh is an open-source chaos engineering platform incubated by the CNCF and developed by PingCAP. It is widely used for resilience testing in Kubernetes environments, has hundreds of contributors, and has a significant footprint in the cloud-native ecosystem. It supports fault injection, workflow orchestration, and advanced chaos experiments in Kubernetes clusters.
Technical information
CVE-2025-59358 is a high-severity vulnerability (CVSS 7.5) in the Chaos Controller Manager component of Chaos Mesh. It is classified as CWE-306 (Missing Authentication for Critical Function).
Root cause:
- The Controller Manager exposes a GraphQL debugging server to the entire Kubernetes cluster network.
- The server has no authentication or authorization at all.
- Its API lets callers kill arbitrary processes in any Kubernetes pod the cluster manages.
- Any user or service with network access to the Controller Manager can use GraphQL introspection to list the available operations, then call mutations that terminate processes in pods.
Attack flow:
- The attacker finds the exposed GraphQL endpoint inside the cluster.
- The attacker uses GraphQL introspection to list the available operations.
- The attacker writes a mutation that calls the process termination API.
- The Controller Manager, which runs with elevated privileges, kills the process in the targeted pod.
- Repeating this can cause a cluster-wide denial of service.
None of these steps requires authentication or authorization.
Affected systems and versions
- Product: Chaos Mesh (CNCF incubating project)
- Component: Chaos Controller Manager
- The vulnerability affects every deployment where the Controller Manager's GraphQL debugging server is reachable from the cluster network without authentication.
- The available references do not give specific version numbers or version ranges. Check whether your deployment exposes the unauthenticated GraphQL endpoint.
Vendor security history
- Chaos Mesh publishes a security policy and a history of vulnerability disclosures on GitHub.
- Previous security advisories are listed at https://github.com/chaos-mesh/chaos-mesh/security
- For CVE-2025-59358, the vendor released a public fix and coordinated disclosure with JFrog researchers.
