Critical vulnerabilities reported in Chaos Mesh tool for Kubernetes Clusters
Take action: If you're using Chaos Mesh for Kubernetes chaos engineering, immediately upgrade to version 2.7.3 or later. There are vulnerabilities that allow attackers to take over your entire cluster. If you can't upgrade redeploy with the GraphQL server disabled.
Learn More
Frog Security Research is reporting multiple critical vulnerabilities in Chaos Mesh, a popular open-source chaos engineering platform for Kubernetes environments. The vulnerabilities, collectively dubbed "Chaotic Deputy," can be exploited by attackers with minimal cluster access to achieve cluster takeover and execute arbitrary code across all pods.
Chaos Mesh is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project that provides fault simulation capabilities for Kubernetes clusters.
Vulnerabilities summary
- CVE-2025-59359 (CVSS score 9.8) - OS Command Injection). The cleanTcs mutation in Chaos Controller Manager is vulnerable to operating system command injection
- CVE-2025-59360 (CVSS score 9.8) - OS Command Injection. The killProcesses mutation in Chaos Controller Manager is vulnerable to operating system command injection
- CVE-2025-59361 (CVSS score 9.8) - OS Command Injection. The cleanIptables mutation in Chaos Controller Manager is vulnerable to operating system command injection
- CVE-2025-59358 (CVSS score 7.5) - Missing Authentication. The Chaos Controller Manager in Chaos Mesh exposes a GraphQL debugging server without authentication to the entire Kubernetes cluster, which provides an API to kill arbitrary processes in any Kubernetes pod, leading to cluster-wide denial-of-service
An in-cluster attacker, i.e., a threat actor with initial access to the cluster's network, could chain CVE-2025-59359, CVE-2025-59360, CVE-2025-59361, or with CVE-2025-59358 to perform remote code execution across the cluster, even in the default configuration of Chaos Mesh
Versions that are affected include all versions of Chaos Mesh prior to 2.7.3. JFrog tied the vulnerabilities to cleanTcs, (a fault injection for testing system resiliency) that did not properly sanitize user input.
Some cloud infrastructure providers that offer Chaos-Mesh implementations as part of their managed Kubernetes Services, such as Azure Chaos Studio, are also impacted. The platform's design inherently grants dangerous API privileges to certain pods, making vulnerability exploitation particularly severe.
Versions that are not affected include Chaos Mesh version 2.7.3 and later releases, which contain fixes for all identified vulnerabilities.
Users of Chaos-Mesh are recommended to upgrade Chaos-Mesh to the fixed version – 2.7.3, as soon as possible. For organizations unable to immediately upgrade, a workaround is available by redeploying the Helm chart with the chaosctl tool and GraphQL server port disabled using the command: helm install chaos-mesh chaos-mesh/chaos-mesh -n=chaos-mesh --version 2.7.x --set enableCtrlServer=false.
