Consul and Consul Enterprise are vulnerable to an authorization bypass in the Connect service mesh that may allow a service to reach a destination it is not authorized to access. When building Envoy RBAC rules to enforce Connect intentions, Consul did not correctly escape certain characters in service names, namespaces, and partitions, causing the generated authorization rules to match more broadly than intended. This vulnerability (CVE-2026-88021) is fixed in Consul 2.0.4 and Consul Enterprise 1.21.18, 1.22.12 and 2.0.4.
History

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:30:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
First Time appeared Hashicorp
Hashicorp consul
Hashicorp consul Enterprise
Vendors & Products Hashicorp
Hashicorp consul
Hashicorp consul Enterprise

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 20:30:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Metrics ssvc

{'options': {'Automatable': 'no', 'Exploitation': 'none', 'Technical Impact': 'partial'}, 'version': '2.0.3'}


Thu, 10 Sep 2026 19:15:00 +0000

Type Values Removed Values Added
Description Consul and Consul Enterprise are vulnerable to an authorization bypass in the Connect service mesh that may allow a service to reach a destination it is not authorized to access. When building Envoy RBAC rules to enforce Connect intentions, Consul did not correctly escape certain characters in service names, namespaces, and partitions, causing the generated authorization rules to match more broadly than intended. This vulnerability (CVE-2026-88021) is fixed in Consul 2.0.4 and Consul Enterprise 1.21.18, 1.22.12 and 2.0.4.
Title Consul vulnerable to an authorization bypass in the Connect service mesh
Weaknesses CWE-185
References
Metrics cvssV3_1

{'score': 7.5, 'vector': 'CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:L/A:N'}


cve-icon MITRE

Status: PUBLISHED

Assigner: HashiCorp

Published: 2026-09-10T18:58:26.951Z

Updated: 2026-09-10T19:21:46.156Z

Reserved: 2026-09-09T19:40:49.639Z

Link: CVE-2026-88021

cve-icon Vulnrichment

Updated: 2026-09-10T19:21:31.963Z

cve-icon NVD

Status : Awaiting Analysis

Published: 2026-09-10T19:17:39.250

Modified: 2026-09-10T20:17:31.317

Link: CVE-2026-88021

cve-icon Redhat

No data.