When kuma-dp is started against an HTTPS control plane and the operator did not pass a CA certificate, the data plane connects with TLS peer verification disabled. The dataplane authentication token is sent over this unverified connection Impact An on-path attacker can intercept the dataplane authentication token and impersonate the control plane to the data plane, allowing them to inject a forged bootstrap configuration and take over the proxy Affected configurations - Universal mode "kuma-dp" started against an HTTPS control plane without "--ca-cert-file" (or "KUMA_CONTROL_PLANE_CA_CERT" unset) Not affected - Kubernetes installs done through the standard installers ("kumactl install control-plane" or the official Helm chart). In both cases the control plane's mutating admission webhook injects "KUMA_CONTROL_PLANE_CA_CERT" into every sidecar at pod admission, so each "kuma-dp" starts with the CA already configured Workarounds Set "--ca-cert-file" (or "KUMA_CONTROL_PLANE_CA_CERT") on every Universal mode data plane and point it at the control plane's serving CA. Alternatively, terminate the control plane behind a publicly trusted certificate; the patched releases will verify successfully against the operating system trust store with no further configuration Resources - Fix: https://github.com/kumahq/kuma/pull/16777