A security issue was discovered in ingress-nginx where the protection afforded by the auth-url Ingress annotation may not be effective in the presence of a specific misconfiguration.
If the ingress-nginx controller is configured with a default custom-errors configuration that includes HTTP errors 401 or 403, and if the configured default custom-errors backend is defective and fails to respect the X-Code HTTP header, then an Ingress with the auth-url annotation may be accessed even when authentication fails.
Note that the built-in custom-errors backend works correctly. To trigger this issue requires an administrator to specifically configure ingress-nginx with a broken external component.