Cyber Resilience

CVE-2023-27488

MediumPublic PoC

Published: 04 April 2023

Published
04 April 2023
Modified
21 November 2024
KEV Added
Patch
CVSS Score v3.1 5.4 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:N
EPSS Score 0.0003 8.6th percentile
Risk Priority 11 60% EPSS · 20% KEV · 20% CVSS

Summary

CVE-2023-27488 is a medium-severity Improper Input Validation (CWE-20) vulnerability in Envoyproxy Envoy. Its CVSS base score is 5.4 (Medium).

Operationally, ranked at the 8.6th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog; a public proof-of-concept is referenced.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability details

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…

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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`.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.

Affected Assets

envoyproxy
envoy
≤ 1.22.9 · 1.23.0 — 1.23.6 · 1.24.0 — 1.24.4

Mitigating Controls

Likely Mitigating Controls AI

Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.

addresses: CWE-20

Security testing and developer training directly verify and enforce proper input validation, reducing exploitability of injection and malformed-data weaknesses.

addresses: CWE-20

Security testing and evaluation at multiple SDLC stages directly detects missing or flawed input validation, with the required remediation process ensuring fixes are applied.

addresses: CWE-20

Directly implements checks on information inputs to reject invalid data before processing.

addresses: CWE-20

Spam protection mechanisms perform filtering and detection on inbound/outbound messages, directly compensating for missing or weak input validation of unsolicited content.

References