CVE-2022-39278

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

HIGH
7.5
CVSS Score
Published: October 13, 2022 at 12:00 AM UTC
Updated: June 17, 2026 at 04:58 AM UTC
1 product affected across 1 vendorIstio

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Severity
HIGH7.5
Exploit prediction
EPSS 1%
SSVC
No known exploit

Description

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.

Affected

Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.

v < 1.13.9v < 1.14.5v < 1.15.21.14.0 ≤ v < 1.14.51.15.0 ≤ v < 1.15.2
Affected range stops below 1.13.9, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement
Affected range stops below 1.14.5, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement
Affected range stops below 1.15.2, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement

Remediation

No guide yet

No remediation guidance has been written for this CVE yet, and no fixed version or vendor advisory is recorded against it.

SSVC — Action Prioritization

SSVCNo known exploitAutomatablePartial impact

SSVC signals action urgency (what to patch first), separate from CVSS which measures severity.

CVSS

7.5HIGHGitHub_M
Attack Vector
NETWORK
Complexity
LOW
Privileges
NONE
User Interaction
NONE
Scope
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality
NONE
Integrity
NONE
Availability
HIGH
Vector?

Quick Info

StatusMODIFIED
CWE
CWE-400

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