- Introduce v1alpha1 API for mutating admission policies, enabling extensible admission control via CEL expressions (KEP  3962: Mutating Admission Policies). To use, enable the `MutatingAdmissionPolicy` feature...

- Replaced deprecated package `k8s.io/utils/pointer` with `k8s.io/utils/ptr` for the pod-security-admission admissiontests. ([#132742](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/132742), [@PatrickLaabs](https://github.com/PatrickLaabs))

- Removed admission plugin `PersistentVolumeLabel`. Please use https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/cloud-pv-admission-labeler instead if you need a similar functionality. ([#124505](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/124505), [@jsafrane](https://github.com/jsafrane)) [SIG API Machinery, Auth and Storage]...

This release contains changes that address the following vulnerabilities:

### CVE-2025-5187: Nodes can delete themselves by adding an OwnerReference

  - A `component-helpers` library for feature registration and inference.
  - A `NodeDeclaredFeatures` scheduler plugin to match pods with nodes that provide required features.
  - A `NodeDeclaredFeatureValidator` admission plugin to validate pod updates against a node's declared features. ([#133389](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/133389), [@pravk03](https://github.com/pravk03)) [SIG API Machinery, Apps, Node, Release, Scheduling and Testing]