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Fencer Vulns
high 7.5

CVE-2022-39278 json

Istio vulnerable to denial of service attack due to Golang Regex Library

published 2022-10-13 4 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2022-41782

cvss
7.5
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.4%
EPSS 1.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 73%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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.

Patch / fix

  • istio istio 1.13.9, 1.14.5, 1.15.2

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-2022-39278 updated cvss 7.5

Istio: Denial of service attack via a specially crafted message

  • 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 RHOSSM 2.3 for RHEL 8 openshift-service-mesh/istio-cni-rhel8 2.3.1-9
    fixed: vendor fix RHSA-2023:0542
  • Red Hat RHOSSM 2.3 for RHEL 8 openshift-service-mesh/pilot-rhel8 2.3.1-9, openshift-service-mesh/kiali-rhel8 1.57.5-3, openshift-service-mesh/grafana-rhel8 2.3.1-5, openshift-service-mesh/proxyv2-rhel8 2.3.1-11, openshift-service-mesh/ratelimit-rhel8 2.3.1-5, openshift-service-mesh/prometheus-rhel8 2.3.1-6, +3 more
    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
yes
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
18 mo ago

Exploit prediction

1.44% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 73% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

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

Affected products

  • istio istio

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

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.