Vulnerability · Published Apr 4, 2023 · Assigned by GitHub_M

CVE-2023-27488Envoy gRPC client produces invalid protobuf when an HTTP header with non-UTF8 value is received.

Medium 5.4

In plain English

A medium-severity improper input validation in envoy from envoyproxy. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.7% (higher than 54% of all known vulnerabilities).

Severity (CVSS 3.1)5.4Medium
Exploit odds (30 days)0.7%top 45.5% of all CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: none
Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

Envoy is an open source edge and service proxy designed for cloud-native applications. Prior to versions 1.26.0, 1.25.3, 1.24.4, 1.23.6, and 1.22.9, escalation of privileges is possible when `failure_mode_allow: true` is configured for `ext_authz` filter. For affected components that are used for logging and/or visibility, requests may not be logged by the receiving service. When Envoy was configured to use ext_authz, ext_proc, tap, ratelimit filters, and grpc access log service and an http header with non-UTF-8 data was received, Envoy would generate an invalid protobuf message and send it to the configured service. The receiving service would typically generate an error when decoding the protobuf message. For ext_authz that was configured with ``failure_mode_allow: true``, the request would have been allowed in this case. For the other services, this could have resulted in other unforeseen errors such as a lack of visibility into requests. As of versions 1.26.0, 1.25.3, 1.24.4, 1.23.6, and 1.22.9, Envoy by default sanitizes the values sent in gRPC service calls to be valid UTF-8, replacing data that is not valid UTF-8 with a `!` character. This behavioral change can be temporarily reverted by setting runtime guard `envoy.reloadable_features.service_sanitize_non_utf8_strings` to false. As a workaround, one may set `failure_mode_allow: false` for `ext_authz`.

Affected products (as reported)

VendorProductVersions
envoyproxy envoy >= 1.25.0, <1.25.3>= 1.24.0, < 1.24.4>= 1.23.0, < 1.23.6< 1.22.9

Weakness: CWE-20 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:N

References