CVE-2023-27488CWE-20

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

Medium · published April 4, 2023

CVSS v3.1
5.4
EPSS
1%
Percentile
53.8
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

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`.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
5.4 · MEDIUM
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:N
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00731 · 53.8th percentile
Weakness
CWE-20 · Improper Input Validation
Published
2023-04-04T17:57Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 04 APR 17:57Z
    Envoy gRPC client produces invalid protobuf when an HTTP header with non-UTF8 value is received.
    cvelistv5