Istio Pilot Misconfiguration Detection

istio-pilot-misconfiguration is a high severity check in the devops category, written in go. Its source is templates/devops/istio/istio-pilot-misconfiguration.go in cert-x-gen-templates.

What it checks

Detects misconfigured Istio Pilot (istiod) control plane endpoints exposed without authentication. Probes port 8080 (HTTP admin), 15010 (xDS plaintext gRPC), and 15014 (monitoring). Exposure allows service mesh topology enumeration, secret extraction, and potential AuthorizationPolicy bypass.

Header

Field	Value
Id	istio-pilot-misconfiguration
Severity	high
Language	go
Category	devops
Author	BugB Technologies
Template version	not recorded
Confidence	90
CVSS	not recorded
Weakness	CWE-306
Tags	istio, service-mesh, kubernetes, misconfiguration, xds, envoy, api-exposure, container-security
Target kind	not recorded
Oracle	not recorded

References

Declared in the header. cxg parses @references and then discards it, and nothing at scan time reads it, so this is the only place the links a template cites are surfaced.

• https://istio.io/latest/docs/ops/best-practices/security/
• https://istio.io/latest/docs/reference/config/istio.pilot.v1alpha1/
• https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1046/

Run it

To see what the copy on your machine says about itself, and to confirm it is installed at all:

cxg template info istio-pilot-misconfiguration

The id it prints is the one to pass anywhere a template is selected. See cxg template for the rest of the subcommand, Scan a target for running a scan, and A match is not a finding for how to read what comes back.

Related

• Template catalog is the whole corpus.
• devops is the rest of this category.
• Templates by weakness class groups checks by the defect they look for.
• Contribute a template is the route from a check you needed and could not find to a merged one.