CVEvulnerability

CVE-2021-39155

7.5 HIGH Published 2021-08-24 Modified 2026-06-17 Official page ↗
Status
Modified
Published
2021-08-24
Last modified
2026-06-17
Assigner
[email protected]
CVSS 3.1 ([email protected])
8.3 HIGH — CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:L
CVSS 3.1 ([email protected])
7.5 HIGH — CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CVSS 2.0 ([email protected])
5.0 MEDIUM — AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:N
Weaknesses
CWE-178, CWE-863

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, 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 guide.

Affected configurations

• istio istio (< 1.9.8) • istio istio (>= 1.10.0 < 1.10.4) • istio istio (>= 1.11.0 < 1.11.1)

Related

Weakness · CWE (2)

  • CWE-178 Improper Handling of Case Sensitivity weakness
  • CWE-863 Incorrect Authorization weakness

Referenced by CWE · observed example (3)

  • CWE-1289 Improper Validation of Unsafe Equivalence in Input weakness
  • CWE-178 Improper Handling of Case Sensitivity weakness
  • CWE-863 Incorrect Authorization weakness

References