CVE-2021-39155

HIGH

Istio < 1.9.8 - Authorization Policy Bypass via Case-Sensitive Hostname Comparison

Title source: llm
STIX 2.1

Description

Istio is an open source platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. According to [RFC 4343](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4343), Istio authorization policy should compare the hostname in the HTTP Host header in a case insensitive way, but currently the comparison is case sensitive. The proxy will route the request hostname in a case-insensitive way which means the authorization policy could be bypassed. As an example, the user may have an authorization policy that rejects request with hostname "httpbin.foo" for some source IPs, but the attacker can bypass this by sending the request with hostname "Httpbin.Foo". Patches are available in Istio 1.11.1, Istio 1.10.4 and Istio 1.9.8. As a work around a Lua filter may be written to normalize Host header before the authorization check. This is similar to the Path normalization presented in the [Security Best Practices](https://istio.io/latest/docs/ops/best-practices/security/#case-normalization) guide.

References (2)

Core 2
Core References
Third Party Advisory x_refsource_misc
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4343

Scores

CVSS v3 8.3
EPSS 0.0112
EPSS Percentile 61.7%
Attack Vector NETWORK
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:L

Details

CWE
CWE-178 CWE-863
Status published
Products (2)
istio/istio < 1.9.8
istio.io/istio 0 - 1.9.8Go
Published Aug 24, 2021
Tracked Since Feb 18, 2026