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Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

CVE-2022-39278

Severity High
Score 7.5/10

Summary

Istio is an open platform-independent service mesh that provides traffic management, policy enforcement, and telemetry collection. Versions prior to 1.13.9, 1.14.x prior to 1.14.5, and 1.15.x prior to 1.15.2 are vulnerable. 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. There are no effective workarounds, beyond upgrading. This bug is due to an error in `regexp.Compile` in Go.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • UNCHANGED
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • HIGH

CWE-400 - Uncontrolled resource consumption

An uncontrolled resource allocation attack (also known as resource exhaustion attack) triggers unauthorized overconsumption of the limited resources in an application, such as memory, file system storage, database connection pool entries, and CPU. This may lead to denial of service for valid users and degradation of the application's functionality as well as that of the host operating system.

Advisory Timeline

  • Published