Medium · published February 22, 2022
Envoy is an open source edge and service proxy, designed for cloud-native applications. In affected versions Envoy does not restrict the set of certificates it accepts from the peer, either as a TLS client or a TLS server, to only those certificates that contain the necessary extendedKeyUsage (id-kp-serverAuth and id-kp-clientAuth, respectively). This means that a peer may present an e-mail certificate (e.g. id-kp-emailProtection), either as a leaf certificate or as a CA in the chain, and it will be accepted for TLS. This is particularly bad when combined with the issue described in pull request #630, in that it allows a Web PKI CA that is intended only for use with S/MIME, and thus exempted from audit or supervision, to issue TLS certificates that will be accepted by Envoy. As a result Envoy will trust upstream certificates that should not be trusted. There are no known workarounds to this issue. Users are advised to upgrade.