Back

CRITICAL

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

Published Apr 4, 2023

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

Remediation

No remediation recorded yet.

Metrics

References (5)

Change history (0)

No recorded changes yet.

Sources
CVE.org / MITRE
Status PUBLISHED
Assigner GitHub_M
Published Apr 4, 2023
Updated Feb 11, 2025
Reserved Mar 1, 2023
CISA Vulnrichment
Updated Feb 11, 2025
NVD
Status Modified
Modified Jun 17, 2026
Red Hat
Severity Important
Public date Apr 4, 2023