Read 2026-11-03
kumahq/kuma: technical due diligence, read from its repository
What Borehole read in kumahq/kuma's code and history at a91f7fe: its licence, security advisories, releases, review practice, tests, dependencies and operations. Every finding cites the file and line it rests on. The full report also covers the team and asks the questions the code cannot answer.
| Dimension | Rating |
|---|---|
| Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance | strong |
| Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity | adequate |
| Product & Engineering Maturity | adequate |
| Security & Reliability Posture | adequate |
| Observability & Operations | strong |
| Fit with the Acquirer | not assessable |
What the repository says
- Releases are cut from another branch than the one surveyed
AGENTS.md:3: names CNCFREADME.md:10: names OpenSSF
Architecture & Codebase — including AI provenance
strongNo finding.
Engineering Process & SDLC Maturity
adequate8% of recent commits change more than 2,000 lines
adequate129 of 1580 commits in the last 24 months changed over 2,000 lines of code, not counting reformatting, renames, vendored or generated code. A change that size is rarely reviewed line by line. Ask how they were reviewed, and what made them that large.
| 129 commits over 2,000 lines |
Product & Engineering Maturity
adequate91 direct dependencies in a single manifest
adequatego.mod declares 91 direct dependencies. Each one is a maintenance obligation, a supply-chain surface and a potential licence question that transfers with the asset. The count says nothing about whether any given dependency was a good choice; it says how many such choices a buyer inherits.
go.mod — 91 declared |
Effort is shifting from building to rewriting
adequateDeleted lines per line added rose from 0.55 to 0.89 between the first and second halves of this history. Rework is normal and often healthy, but a rising ratio means an increasing share of the team's time is spent replacing code that already exists rather than building what does not. Whether that is deliberate repayment or churn is a question for the team.
| first half 0.55, second half 0.89 (split 2023-01-07) |
21 files still carry code deprecated more than two years ago
adequate21 files were marked deprecated over two years ago and still are, the oldest since Dec 2020. A deprecation is a promise to remove. Ask what still depends on these, and whether removing them is scheduled.
api/mesh/v1alpha1/mesh_insight.pb.go — deprecated since Dec 2020 |
api/mesh/v1alpha1/mesh.pb.go — deprecated since Dec 2020 |
api/mesh/v1alpha1/dataplane.pb.go — deprecated since Dec 2020 |
api/mesh/v1alpha1/dataplane_insight.pb.go — deprecated since Dec 2020 |
api/mesh/v1alpha1/dataplane_overview.pb.go — deprecated since Dec 2020 |
Releases are cut from another branch than the one surveyed
adequateThe newest release, v3.0.1, is not on the branch this survey read; the newest release on it is v3.0.0. The shipped product may differ from what this report describes. Survey the release branch too.
| tag v3.0.1 |
Security & Reliability Posture
adequate6 credential-shaped strings in the tree sit in tests, examples, documentation or local development settings
adequateStrings shaped like credentials appear only where fakes are usual: test fixtures, examples, documentation, placeholders and local stacks. They are almost always fakes. Ask someone to confirm that none of them works anywhere, because a real key in a development file is still a real key. 1 other match set aside: expired tokens, licence tokens a vendor verifies with a public key, or placeholder text where a key would go. None grants access to anything.
| private key block, where fakes are usual |
| 4 cited: JWT, where fakes are usual |
13 advisories against this project in the last 24 months, 2 high or critical
adequateThe newest was published on 2026-08-17. A project that publishes advisories is telling its users about its fixes, and the count and pace say how much security work it carries. None of them affects the surveyed version. The record is incomplete: NVD: 16 records name kuma with nothing tying them to this repository (CVE-2023-25810, CVE-2023-25811, CVE-2023-26777, …).
| 2026-08-17: GHSA-m58j-fjmc-h3g4 (high), fixed in 2.7.29: Multi-zone Kuma: global control plane attributes KDS-synced resources by an unvalidated in-band zone identifier |
| 2026-08-17: CVE-2026-18674 (high): On a Kong Mesh global control plane, resources received over the zone-to-global KDS sync are attributed using the in-band, sender-controlled ControlPlane.Identi |
| 2026-08-12: CVE-2026-18673 (moderate): When kuma-dp is configured with the Envoy admin API on a Unix domain socket, which is the default, its readiness service on TCP port 9902 - bound to all interfa |
| 2026-08-12: CVE-2026-18675 (moderate): The dataplane token validator in kuma-cp performs an unchecked Go type assertion on the JWT kid header. A token whose kid is a JSON number decodes as a float64 |
| 2026-08-12: CVE-2026-18676 (moderate): The default kuma-cp configuration in Kong Mesh reveals the admin bootstrap token and signing keys to any webpage the operator visits while the control plane is |
Observability & Operations
strongNo error reporter is wired in
adequateNothing in the service initialises an error reporter (Sentry, Rollbar, Bugsnag, Honeybadger or an APM agent). An exception in production reaches a person only if someone is reading the logs, which usually means a customer reports it first.
| no error reporter initialised |
1 of 1 deployed images carry no version, or `latest`
adequate1 images in the deployment configuration are named without a version or as `latest`. A redeploy can change the software without a commit, a rollback has nothing to roll back to, and nobody can say from the repository what is running.
deployments/charts/kuma/values.yaml:659 — image without a version |
Fit with the Acquirer
not assessableNot rated: structurally not assessable from a repository.
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