CVE-2022-39278 Istio vulnerable to denial of service attack due to Golang Regex Library
Attackers can crash the Istio control plane by sending oversized messages to the webhook service if it is exposed publicly.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- None listed
What is CVE-2022-39278?
CVE-2022-39278 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in istio, published on 13 Oct 2022. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.
Official description
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.
Weakness: CWE-400
Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-39278?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Istio Istio.
How do I fix CVE-2022-39278?
No fix has been published for CVE-2022-39278 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.
Is CVE-2022-39278 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-39278 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in istio
- CVE-2021-31921 Missing authorization in n/a
- CVE-2021-34824 Information disclosure in n/a
- CVE-2026-31837 Istio JWKS resolver to prevent private key material from being exposed when JWKS fetch fails.
- CVE-2021-39155 Authorization Policy Bypass Due to Case Insensitive Host Comparison
- CVE-2021-39156 Fragments in Path May Lead to Authorization Policy Bypass
Sources
Also known as GHSA-86vr-4wcv-mm9w.