Announcing Istio 1.29.3

This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.29.2 and 1.29.3.

Changes

• Added support for Gateway API v1.4.1.

• Added an istioctl analyze warning (IST0175) when RequestAuthentication resources exist but BLOCKED_CIDRS_IN_JWKS_URIS is not configured on istiod. (Issue #59523)

• Added feature flags PILOT_HBONE_INITIAL_STREAM_WINDOW_SIZE and PILOT_HBONE_INITIAL_CONNECTION_WINDOW_SIZE. They can configure the initial stream and connection window sizes for HBONE connections to upstream clusters (generated for waypoints and east-west gateways). These may be used to reduce unwanted buffering. (Issue #59961)

• Fixed an issue where Istiod could issue leaf certificates with a NotAfter time beyond the signing certificate’s expiration. (Issue #59768)

• Fixed a deadlock in the multicluster secret controller that could occur during remote cluster updates. (Issue #59875)

• Fixed an authorization bypass in AuthorizationPolicy matching for SPIFFE identities and namespaces. Regex metacharacters in fields like source.principals (suffix matching) and source.namespaces were not properly escaped in the generated Envoy configuration, potentially allowing unintended identities to match policy rules.

• Fixed kubelet health probe failures for ambient mesh pods on AWS EKS when using Security Groups for Pods (branch ENI). istio-cni now detects branch ENI pods and adds IP rules to route probe traffic via the veth pair instead of VPC fabric. Gated behind the feature flag AMBIENT_ENABLE_AWS_BRANCH_ENI_PROBE (enabled by default).

• Fixed an issue where istioctl ztunnel-config service JSON and YAML output did not include the canonical field from the ztunnel configuration dump. (Issue #59962)

• Fixed XDS debug endpoints (istio.io/debug/syncz and istio.io/debug/config_dump) served by StatusGen to enforce same-namespace authorization for non-system callers. Previously an authenticated workload from any namespace could enumerate proxies and retrieve configuration dumps for workloads in other namespaces.

Credit: This vulnerability was discovered and reported by 1seal.

Security update

• Fixed an authorization bypass in AuthorizationPolicy where regex metacharacters in certain identity fields were embedded in the generated Envoy SafeRegex without escaping. As a result, legal Kubernetes names containing characters like . or [ could be treated as regex wildcards, admitting identities beyond the policy author’s intent. This issue affected source.principals (specifically suffix matches starting with *) and source.namespaces. (Issue #59992)

Credit: This vulnerability was discovered and reported by Alex.