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Fencer Intel
medium 6.5

CVE-2021-20278 json

Kiali Authentication Bypass vulnerability

published 5y ago modified 4mo ago also GHSA-ggjr-2f7v-vhq4 , GO-2022-0700 , EUVD-2021-1325

cvss
6.5
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.8%
EPSS 0.8% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 55%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

An authentication bypass vulnerability was found in Kiali in versions before 1.31.0 when the authentication strategy `OpenID` is used. When RBAC is enabled, Kiali assumes that some of the token validation is handled by the underlying cluster. When OpenID `implicit flow` is used with RBAC turned off, this token validation doesn't occur, and this allows a malicious user to bypass the authentication.

Patch / fix

  • go github.com/kiali/kiali 1.31.0
  • kiali kiali 1.31.0

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Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2021-20278 updated cvss 7.2

kiali: authentication bypass when using the OpenID login strategy

  • Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh 2.0 kiali
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

0.76% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 55% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 6.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:N
NVD 2.0 5.8 AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:N
GitHub 3.1 6.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:N

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
go github.com/kiali/kiali
<1.31.0
1.31.0

Affected products

  • n/a kiali

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-290 Authentication Bypass by Spoofing
  • CWE-287 Improper Authentication

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.