CVE-2021-39155

8.3
HIGHCVSS v3.1 Base Score
1.19%
LOW RiskEPSS (67th percentile)

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 authorization check. This is similar to the Path normalization presented in the [Security Best Practices](https://istio.io/latest/docs/ops/best-practices/security/#case-normalization) guide.

Published: 8/24/2021
Modified: 6/17/2026
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Vulnerability Summary

CVSS v3 Score

8.3HIGH

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:L

CVSS v2 Score

5

AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:N

EPSS Score (Exploitation Probability)

1.19%LOW Exploitation Risk
67th percentile

This vulnerability has a 1.19% probability of being exploited in the next 30 days, ranking higher than 67% of all scored CVEs.

CWE Classification

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