CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-32780 — Envoy is an open source L7 proxy and communication bus designed for large modern service oriented architectures

High CVSS 8.6

Envoy is an open source L7 proxy and communication bus designed for large modern service oriented architectures. In affected versions Envoy transitions a H/2 connection to the CLOSED state when it receives a GOAWAY frame without any streams outstanding. The connection state is transitioned to DRAINING when it receives a SETTING frame with the SETTINGS_MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS parameter set to 0. Receiving these two frames in the same I/O event results in abnormal termination of the Envoy process due to invalid state transition from CLOSED to DRAINING. A sequence of H/2 frames delivered by an untrusted upstream server will result in Denial of Service in the presence of untrusted **upstream** servers. Envoy versions 1.19.1, 1.18.4 contain fixes to stop processing of pending H/2 frames after connection transition to the CLOSED state.

Severity
High
CVSS
8.6 (3.1)
Published
2021-08-24
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-754

Affected products

  • envoyproxy / envoy
  • envoyproxy / envoy / 1.19.0

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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