CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-32778 — Envoy is an open source L7 proxy and communication bus designed for large modern service oriented architectures

High CVSS 7.5

Envoy is an open source L7 proxy and communication bus designed for large modern service oriented architectures. In affected versions envoy’s procedure for resetting a HTTP/2 stream has O(N^2) complexity, leading to high CPU utilization when a large number of streams are reset. Deployments are susceptible to Denial of Service when Envoy is configured with high limit on H/2 concurrent streams. An attacker wishing to exploit this vulnerability would require a client opening and closing a large number of H/2 streams. Envoy versions 1.19.1, 1.18.4, 1.17.4, 1.16.5 contain fixes to reduce time complexity of resetting HTTP/2 streams. As a workaround users may limit the number of simultaneous HTTP/2 dreams for upstream and downstream peers to a low number, i.e. 100.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2021-08-24
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-834

Affected products

  • envoyproxy / envoy
  • envoyproxy / envoy / 1.19.0

Showing 2 representative product identities from 4 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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