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Fencer Vulns
medium 6.8

CVE-2022-21679 json

Authorization Policy bypass in Istio

published 2022-01-19 4 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2022-26891

cvss
6.8
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.1%
EPSS 1.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 65%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Istio is an open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices. In Istio 1.12.0 and 1.12.1 The authorization policy with hosts and notHosts might be accidentally bypassed for ALLOW action or rejected unexpectedly for DENY action during the upgrade from 1.11 to 1.12.0/1.12.1. Istio 1.12 supports the hosts and notHosts fields in authorization policy with a new Envoy API shipped with the 1.12 data plane. A bug in the 1.12.0 and 1.12.1 incorrectly uses the new Envoy API with the 1.11 data plane. This will cause the hosts and notHosts fields to be always matched regardless of the actual value of the host header when mixing 1.12.0/1.12.1 control plane and 1.11 data plane. Users are advised to upgrade or to not mix the 1.12.0/1.12.1 control plane with 1.11 data plane if using hosts or notHosts field in authorization policy.

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2022-21679 updated cvss 9.8

istio: Authorization policy bypass

  • Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh 1 servicemesh, servicemesh-mixc, servicemesh-mixs, servicemesh-galley, servicemesh-citadel, servicemesh-istioctl, +3 more
    affected: no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh 2.1 servicemesh, servicemesh-cni, servicemesh-pilot-agent, servicemesh-pilot-discovery
    affected: no fix planned “Will not fix”
  • Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh 2.0 servicemesh, servicemesh-mixc, servicemesh-mixs, servicemesh-istioctl, servicemesh-pilot-agent, servicemesh-pilot-discovery
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
total
Assessed
18 mo ago

Exploit prediction

1.07% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 65% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 6.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N
NVD 3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 7.5 AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P

Affected products

  • istio istio

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-670 Always-Incorrect Control Flow Implementation

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.