Istio vulnerable to denial of service attack due to Golang Regex Library
CVE-2022-39278

7.5HIGH

Key Information:

Vendor

Istio

Status
Vendor
CVE Published:
13 October 2022

What is CVE-2022-39278?

Istio is an open platform-independent service mesh that provides traffic management, policy enforcement, and telemetry collection. Prior to versions 1.15.2, 1.14.5, and 1.13.9, the Istio control plane, istiod, is vulnerable to a request processing error, allowing a malicious attacker that sends a specially crafted or oversized message which results in the control plane crashing when the Kubernetes validating or mutating webhook service is exposed publicly. This endpoint is served over TLS port 15017, but does not require any authentication from the attacker. For simple installations, Istiod is typically only reachable from within the cluster, limiting the blast radius. However, for some deployments, especially external istiod topologies, this port is exposed over the public internet. Versions 1.15.2, 1.14.5, and 1.13.9 contain patches for this issue. There are no effective workarounds, beyond upgrading. This bug is due to an error in regexp.Compile in Go.

Affected Version(s)

istio < 1.13.9 < 1.13.9

istio >= 1.14.0, < 1.14.5 < 1.14.0, 1.14.5

istio >= 1.15.0, < 1.15.2 < 1.15.0, 1.15.2

References

CVSS V3.1

Score:
7.5
Severity:
HIGH
Confidentiality:
None
Integrity:
None
Availability:
None
Attack Vector:
Network
Attack Complexity:
Low
Privileges Required:
None
User Interaction:
None
Scope:
Unchanged

Timeline

  • Vulnerability published

  • Vulnerability Reserved

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