Security Update - ISTIO-SECURITY-2019-005

Today we are releasing three new Istio versions: 1.1.16, 1.2.7, and 1.3.2. These new Istio versions address vulnerabilities that can be used to mount Denial of Service (DoS) attacks against services using Istio.

ISTIO-SECURITY-2019-005: Envoy, and subsequently Istio, are vulnerable to the following DoS attack: * CVE-2019-15226: Upon receiving each incoming request, Envoy will iterate over the request headers to verify that the total size of the headers stays below a maximum limit. A remote attacker may craft a request that stays below the maximum request header size but consists of many thousands of small headers to consume CPU and result in a denial-of-service attack.

Affected Istio Releases

The following Istio releases are vulnerable:

  • 1.1, 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.1.3, 1.1.4, 1.1.5, 1.1.6, 1.1.7, 1.1.8, 1.1.9, 1.1.10, 1.1.11, 1.1.12, 1.1.13, 1.1.14, 1.1.15
  • 1.2, 1.2.1, 1.2.2, 1.2.3, 1.2.4, 1.2.5, 1.2.6
  • 1.3, 1.3.1

Impact Score

Overall CVSS score: 7.5 CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Vulnerability impact and Detection

Both Istio gateways and sidecars are vulnerable to this issue. If you are running one of the versions listed above, your cluster is vulnerable.

Mitigation

  • For Istio 1.1.x deployments: update all control plane components (Pilot, Mixer, Citadel, and Galley) and then upgrade the data plane to a minimum version of Istio 1.1.16.
  • For Istio 1.2.x deployments: update all control plane components (Pilot, Mixer, Citadel, and Galley) and then upgrade the data plane to a minimum version of Istio 1.2.7.
  • For Istio 1.3.x deployments: update all control plane components (Pilot, Mixer, Citadel, and Galley) and then upgrade the data plane to a minimum version of Istio 1.3.2.

We’d like to remind our community to follow the vulnerability reporting process to report any bug that can result in a security vulnerability.