End of life: 11/30/2026, Latest version: 1.30.3

Istio is an open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices. Prior to versions 1.28.6 and 1.29.2, when a RequestAuthentication resource is created with a jwksUri pointing to an internal service, istiod makes an unauthenticated HTTP GET request to that URL without filtering out localhost or link local ips. This can result in sensitive data being distributed to Envoy proxies via xDS configuration. This issue has been patched in versions 1.28.6 and 1.29.2.

Impact The serviceAccounts and notServiceAccounts fields in AuthorizationPolicy incorrectly interpret dots (.) as a regular expression matcher. Because . is a valid character in a service account name, an AuthorizationPolicy ALLOW rule targeting SA e.g. cert-manager.io also matches cert-manager-io, cert-managerXio, etc. A DENY rule targeting the same name fails to block those variants.

Patches Fixes are available in 1.29.2, 1.28.6, and 1.27.9

Workarounds None

Istio is an open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices. Prior to 1.29.1, 1.28.5, and 1.27.8, a user of Istio is impacted if the JWKS resolver becomes unavailable or the fetch fails, exposing hardcoded defaults regardless of use of the RequestAuthentication resource. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.29.1, 1.28.5, and 1.27.8.

Istio is an open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices. Prior to 1.29.1, 1.28.5, and 1.27.8, a vulnerability in Envoy RBAC header matching could allow authorization policy bypass when policies rely on HTTP headers that may contain multiple values. An attacker could craft requests with multiple header values in a way that causes Envoy to evaluate the header differently than intended, potentially bypassing authorization checks. This may allow unauthorized requests to reach protected services when policies depend on such header-based matching conditions. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.29.1, 1.28.5, and 1.27.8.

Istio is an open platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices. Prior to 1.29.1, 1.28.5, and 1.27.8, a user of Istio is impacted if the JWKS resolver becomes unavailable or the fetch fails, exposing hardcoded defaults regardless of use of the RequestAuthentication resource. This vulnerability is fixed in 1.29.1, 1.28.5, and 1.27.8.

End of life: 8/31/2026, Latest version: 1.29.6

End of life: 7/1/2026, Latest version: 1.28.10

End of life: 4/7/2026, Latest version: 1.27.9

End of life: 12/22/2025, Latest version: 1.26.8

HTTP/2 Rapid reset attack The HTTP/2 protocol allows clients to indicate to the server that a previous stream should be canceled by sending a RSTSTREAM frame. The protocol does not require the client and server to coordinate the cancellation in any way, the client may do it unilaterally. The client may also assume that the cancellation will take effect immediately when the server receives the RSTSTREAM frame, before any other data from that TCP connection is processed.

Abuse of this feature is called a Rapid Reset attack because it relies on the ability for an endpoint to send a RSTSTREAM frame immediately after sending a request frame, which makes the other endpoint start working and then rapidly resets the request. The request is canceled, but leaves the HTTP/2 connection open.

The HTTP/2 Rapid Reset attack built on this capability is simple: The client opens a large number of streams at once as in the standard HTTP/2 attack, but rather than waiting for a response to each request stream from the server or proxy, the client cancels each request immediately.

The ability to reset streams immediately allows each connection to have an indefinite number of requests in flight. By explicitly canceling the requests, the attacker never exceeds the limit on the number of concurrent open streams. The number of in-flight requests is no longer dependent on the round-trip time (RTT), but only on the available network bandwidth.

In a typical HTTP/2 server implementation, the server will still have to do significant amounts of work for canceled requests, such as allocating new stream data structures, parsing the query and doing header decompression, and mapping the URL to a resource. For reverse proxy implementations, the request may be proxied to the backend server before the RSTSTREAM frame is processed. The client on the other hand paid almost no costs for sending the requests. This creates an exploitable cost asymmetry between the server and the client.

Multiple software artifacts implementing HTTP/2 are affected. This advisory was originally ingested from the swift-nio-http2 repo advisory and their original conent follows.

swift-nio-http2 specific advisory swift-nio-http2 is vulnerable to a denial-of-service vulnerability in which a malicious client can create and then reset a large number of HTTP/2 streams in a short period of time. This causes swift-nio-http2 to commit to a large amount of expensive work which it then throws away, including creating entirely new Channels to serve the traffic. This can easily overwhelm an EventLoop and prevent it from making forward progress.

swift-nio-http2 1.28 contains a remediation for this issue that applies reset counter using a sliding window. This constrains the number of stream resets that may occur in a given window of time. Clients violating this limit will have their connections torn down. This allows clients to continue to cancel streams for legitimate reasons, while constraining malicious actors.

A flaw was found in istio. This flaw allows an attacker to send a specially crafted message to isitiod, causing the control plane to crash.

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. Istio 1.11.0, 1.10.3 and below, and 1.9.7 and below contain a remotely exploitable vulnerability where an HTTP request with #fragment in the path may bypass Istio’s URI path based authorization policies. 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 the path.

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.

Istio 1.4.x before 1.4.9 and Istio 1.5.x before 1.5.4 contain the following vulnerability when telemetry v2 is enabled: by sending a specially crafted packet, an attacker could trigger a Null Pointer Exception resulting in a Denial of Service. This could be sent to the ingress gateway or a sidecar, triggering a null pointer exception which results in a denial of service. This also affects servicemesh-proxy where a null pointer exception flaw was found in servicemesh-proxy. When running Telemetry v2 (not on by default in version 1.4.x), an attacker could send a specially crafted packet to the ingress gateway or proxy sidecar, triggering a denial of service.

Istio through 1.5.1 and Envoy through 1.14.1 have a data-leak issue. If there is a TCP connection (negotiated with SNI over HTTPS) to .example.com, a request for a domain concurrently configured explicitly (e.g., abc.example.com) is sent to the server(s) listening behind .example.com. The outcome should instead be 421 Misdirected Request. Imagine a shared caching forward proxy re-using an HTTP/2 connection for a large subnet with many users. If a victim is interacting with abc.example.com, and a server (for abc.example.com) recycles the TCP connection to the forward proxy, the victim's browser may suddenly start sending sensitive data to a .example.com server. This occurs because the forward proxy between the victim and the origin server reuses connections (which obeys the specification), but neither Istio nor Envoy corrects this by sending a 421 error. Similarly, this behavior voids the security model browsers have put in place between domains.

An issue was discovered in Istio 1.3 through 1.3.6. Under certain circumstances, it is possible to bypass a specifically configured Mixer policy. Istio-proxy accepts the x-istio-attributes header at ingress that can be used to affect policy decisions when Mixer policy selectively applies to a source equal to ingress. To exploit this vulnerability, someone has to encode a source.uid in this header. This feature is disabled by default in Istio 1.3 and 1.4.

A flaw was found in Istio in all versions released after 1.3 (included). The flaw is in Istio's Authentication Policy exact path matching logic and can allow unauthorized access to a HTTP path, even if the path is configured to be only accessed with a valid JWT token.