cilium-cli is the command line interface to install, manage, and troubleshoot Kubernetes clusters running Cilium. Prior to version 0.13.2,cilium-cli, when used to configure cluster mesh functionality, can remove the enforcement of user permissions on the etcd store used to mirror local cluster information to remote clusters. Users who have set up cluster meshes using the Cilium Helm chart are not affected by this issue.

Due to an incorrect mount point specification, the settings specified by the initContainer that configures etcd users and their permissions are overwritten when using cilium-cli to configure a cluster mesh. An attacker who has already gained access to a valid key and certificate for an etcd cluster compromised in this manner could then modify state in that etcd cluster. This issue is patched in cilium-cli 0.13.2.

As a workaround, one may use Cilium's Helm charts to create their cluster.