CVE-2021-39155
CVE-2021-39155 — Authorization Policy Bypass Due to Case Insensitive Host Comparison
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…
Published Updated Sources: cvelistV5, GitHub_M
Triage
Is it exploited, how likely is exploitation, what does it touch, and how severe do the scoring sources call it.
Exploitation
Unreported
no source claims exploitation
EPSS
1%
chance of exploitation in 30 days
CVSS base
8.3
HIGH
Affected scope
The catalog records vendors and products as separate lists, not pairs, so which product belongs to which vendor is not something this page can say.
Vendors (1)
Products (1)
Every base score collected
Sources score independently and disagree; each row says who scored it and under which version.
| Score | Version | Severity | Expl. | Impact | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8.3 | CVSS 3.1 | HIGH | — | — | cvelistV5 |
Weakness & attack patterns
- CWE-178
Detection
Read off the CVSS vector and the weakness class. Starting points, not rules we have tested.
- Search application, proxy, and WAF logs for requests touching //datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4343).
References
2 on the record
- github.com/istio/istio/security/advisories/GHSA-7774-7vr3-cc8j
x_refsource_CONFIRM
- datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4343
x_refsource_MISC
Elsewhere on this site
Not in any source we poll
Listed rather than left blank: an empty field and an unmeasured one look identical on screen, and only one is a reason to look elsewhere.
- No confirmed IOCs, IP addresses, domains, file hashes, or malware artifacts supplied.
- No organization-specific asset inventory, compensating-control status, or patch deployment evidence supplied.
- No exploit packet captures, log samples, or incident case IDs supplied.