CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2023-27493 — Envoy is an open source edge and service proxy designed for cloud-native applications
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, Envoy does not sanitize or escape request properties when generating request headers. This can lead to characters that are illegal in header values to be sent to the upstream service. In the worst case, it can cause upstream service to interpret the original request as two pipelined requests, possibly bypassing the intent of Envoy’s security policy. Versions 1.26.0, 1.25.3, 1.24.4, 1.23.6, and 1.22.9 contain a patch. As a workaround, disable adding request headers based on the downstream request properties, such as downstream certificate properties.
- Severity
- Critical
- CVSS
- 9.1 (3.1)
- Published
- 2023-04-04
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-20, CWE-444
Affected products
- envoyproxy / envoy
Matched remediation archetype
HTTP request smuggling and message-boundary ambiguity
This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.
Check exposure
- Inventory every proxy, CDN, gateway, load balancer, service mesh, and application server hop on affected request paths.
- Compare documented parsing and normalization behavior for message length, transfer coding, duplicate headers, and protocol translation.
- Identify connection reuse and which downstream services trust headers added by intermediaries.
Remediate safely
- Update affected intermediaries and origin servers and align them on a single standards-compliant request framing policy.
- Reject ambiguous length, transfer-coding, duplicate, malformed, and unsupported framing before forwarding.
- Normalize or remove hop-by-hop and identity headers at one controlled boundary and add multi-hop regression tests.
Authoritative sources
Complete CVE record and remediation plan
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