Project: Envoy (Orchestration & Management / Service Proxy)
File: cve-2019-9900.md

2019-02-18 - 2019-04-05 @htuch Final Two independent vulnerabilities related to a mismatch between the information used for request matching and routing were discovered in February/March 2019, leading to the potential ability for an attacker to bypass access control checks and route table intent. Since these issues had similar attack vectors and were discovered within the same embargo window, the issues were grouped and resolved (mostly) privately by Envoy and Istio fix teams, resulting in the Envoy 1.9.1 security release issued on 2019-04-05. This was the first time in which the Envoy security release process was followed and provided a learning opportunity to refine the process, originally borrowed from the Kubernetes project, to Envoy's requirements. While the issues were upgraded from medium to high criticality during the fix process, they were limited in impact to a subset of users and specific configuration patterns. This postmortem captures the issues encountered during the fix process and provides actionable next steps. https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/issues/6434 https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/issues/6435 CVE-2019-9900 resulted from Envoy assuming that its codec libraries (http-parser, nghttp2) followed RFC 7230 and would reject any header value with an embedded NUL character. Unfortunately, http-parser did not do this due to an optimization in header value processing (https://github.com/nodejs/http-parser/issues/468, https://github.com/nodejs/http-parser/pull/469). In addition, Envoy viewed header strings with a mixture of `cstr()` and `stringview`, allowing the possibility of inconsistent views between checks and resulting action. A combination of a buggy external dependency and problematic use of C string views led to this vulnerability. CVE-2019-9901 resulted from two distinct views of the role of a proxy in path handling. On the one hand, Envoy was considered a data forwarding engine for HTTP requests that did not need to perform path normalization, with this concern left to client and backend. However, at the same time, Envoy was being used in applications where it intermediated on requests for access control purposes (e.g. RBAC, `ext_authz`) and performed path matching against policy. Especially in the presence of a backend that itself normalizes, this access control role required that path normalization be applied in the proxy. CVE-2019-9900 was reported by Envoy maintainer @htuch on 2019-03-10 to envoy-security@googlegroups.com. After some discussion, it was agreed that this warranted invoking the security release process. The issue was mitigated in the Envoy private security repository by @htuch and the Envoy security fix team. A single patch (https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/commit/b155af75fad7861e941b5939dc001abf581c9203) was required to workaround the http-parser behavior. In addition, both tests and fuzzers were created to validate the behavior when NULs were introduced anywhere in an HTTP/1 or HTTP/2 request (https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/commit/1e61a3f95f2c4d9ac1e54feae8693cee7906e2eb). Manual code inspection was also performed in nghttp2 to verify the absence of vulnerability. While doing so, a non-security related bug was discovered (https://github.com/nghttp2/nghttp2/issues/1331). Shortly after discovery of CVE-2019-9900, the http-parser issue was reported to the Node.js security working group at security@nodejs.org, since http-parser lives under the umbrella of the Node.js project. The full vulnerability was described and the Envoy security team proposed working with Node.js PST. As there was no reply, we proceeded independently. Unfortunately, it appears that the Node.js security WG never received the e-mail, due to the reliance of Node.js on HackerOne to gate incoming issues and a problematic e-mail forwarding chain (https://github.com/nodejs/security-wg/issues/454#issuecomment-481919759). We have since filed a HackerOne issue with the original report

CVE-2019-9901 was privately disclosed to the Istio security team by an external researcher on 2019-02-18 and accidentally publicly disclosed in part in https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/issues/6008 on 2019-03-13. Once the severity of this was realized via offline discussion between the Envoy security team and the PR authors, we moved to a private fix process in conjunction with CVE-2019-9900, targeting the 1.9.1 release. The Google Istio security and networking teams led the efforts to fix this vulnerability in Envoy's private security repository. The workaround implementation of path normalization borrowed from Chromium's URL library, adapted and minified for the Envoy context. The follow patches were produced: https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/commit/c22cfd2c483fc26534382a0b6835f45264bb137a https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/commit/7ed6d2187df94c4cb96f7dccb8643bf764af2ccb In both cases, the Envoy security team considered the issues of medium criticality (CVSS 6.5) initially, since it was thought that the attack complexity was high, requiring special circumstances to apply. As we continued discussion with Istio and Google teams, it became apparent that the exploits were trivial to automate and we upgraded to high criticality (CVSS 8.3), due to the lower attack complexity. A 1.9.1 security release was initially targeted for 2019-04-02 and announced on 2019-03-22. An e-mail was sent to the Envoy private distributor list sharing CVE details. After private discussions with a distributor on 2019-03-28, who expressed concern over the very short (3 working day) distance between fix patch availability and release, the Envoy security team decided to delay the 1.9.1 release until 2019-04-05. This provided 1 week for distributors to prepare their software for the security release date. Fix patches were shared with the private distributor list late on 2019-03-28. During the fix process, two distributors reached out to us to request the ability to stage in publicly accessible locations binary images with the fixes applied. While technically this would violate embargo, we decided to allow this due to a lack of a clear alternative; Envoy's sidecar use cases and reliance on Docker for distribution, where images are generally staged on public hubs, did not lend itself to opaque rollout. The underlying issue behind CVE-2019-9900 was first noticed via fuzzers when an explicit `ASSERT` check for embedded NULs was added in #6170. The following issue was tripped by `h1capturefuzz_test`: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/oss-fuzz/issues/detail?id=13613. Some experiments with `netcat`, `tcpdump` and an Envoy binary demonstrated that it was viable to at least bypass header suffix matches via this mechanism. CVE-2019-9901 was reported by an external researcher (Erlend Oftedal) to the Istio security team. https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aissue+%22Action+item+for+CVE-2019-9900%22+ https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aissue+%22Action+item+for+CVE-2019-9901%22+ Fix patches were available within 2 weeks of vulnerability disclosure. The changes were localized and relatively clean. The Envoy private distributor list was initially almost empty. We sent out an e-mail to remind distributors to sign up on 2019-03-14 and the list is now O(10). The security impact of https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/issues/6008 was not caught by Envoy until this was brought to our attention ~20 days after the issue was first pushed. Ideally such issues should be routed to envoy-security@googlegroups.com first in the future and Envoy reviewers/maintainers should keep an eye out for inadvertent security disclosures through public channels. In addition, an earlier issue https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/issues/2956 was opened a year previous, but was not tagged as being security sensitive. Applicants for the private distributor list were turned down based on membership criteria that was adopted from k8s. This is now being revisited in https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/issues/6586. Distributors were only provided 3 days from candidate fix patch availability until public release at

While this was extended to 1 week, even this might be too little. This is now being codified in https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/issues/6587. The Chromium URL library was forked, minified and adapted to Envoy. This was expedient but not a maintainable long term solution, see https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/issues/6588. Only coarse grained control over path normalization was provided, since this was expedient and mitigated the vulnerability. We should provide finer grained controls, see https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/issues/6589. Our report to the Node.js security working group was lost due to https://github.com/nodejs/security-wg/issues/454#issuecomment-481919759. We should avoid this happening Envoy-side, see https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/issues/6590. More generally, we should err on the side of reaching out over more channels in the future, since it's unclear how effective any given disclosure channel is. The security release day (2019-04-05) was Friday PDT. We should pick a globally friendly day-of-week, e.g. Tue-Thu, for security releases. Nginx already had a CVE for path normalization (https://www.rapid7.com/db/vulnerabilities/nginx-cve-2009-3898) similar to CVE-2019-9901, but we did not know this until after the fact. We should audit CVEs for similar class software, see https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/issues/6592. A distributor reached out to the security team for permission to perform silent binary rollouts as discussed above. While in principle our relaxation of the embargo policy applied to all distributors, an e-mail was not sent to the list. This resulted in confusion when a second distributor observed this rollout. We should ensure going forward that any policy relaxation during CVE handling is clearly communicated across the board. Public, albeit silent, staging of Docker images before the public security release date was a necessary pragmatic tradeoff. We need to refine the security release process to deal with this explicitly, see https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/issues/6593. The security release forced `envoy-dev:latest` back to the 1.9.1 release branch. This should be fixed, see https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/issues/6595. There was a window of ~50 minutes between the release tagging of the Envoy 1.9.1 branch and availability of Docker images. Ideally we shrink this to allow users to upgrade faster. See https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/issues/6596. The CVE-2019-9901 fix required either control plane or runtime changes. This orchestration was not well suited to all deployment environments, so some distributions, e.g. Istio, applied additional patches to enable at compile time. Ideally we support control plane, runtime and CLI or compile-time fix opt-in abilities. The defects were not critical (by CVSS scoring and intuition) and (mostly) privately disclosed. This provided an opportunity to exercise and refine the Envoy security release process. Huffman and HPACK in general frustrates HTTP/2 testing and fuzzing for security properties. We had no effective fuzzing or testing for this previously as a result, we were lucky that the scope of CVE-2019-9900 was limited to HTTP/1.1. CVE-2019-9900 was only discovered as a result of additional `ASSERT`s added to verify a property that Envoy developers were certain held. Fuzzing alone had not previously caught this. Distributors were able to execute their own security releases within the 1 week provided from patch availability. Anecdotally, this involved effort beyond that which we should expect normally to manage an Envoy fix. No known instances reported of pre-release embargo breakage due to silent public staging of Docker images. All times US/Pacific 2019-02-18: [CVE-2019-9901] Path normalization issue was reported to Istio security team at vulnerabilities@discuss.istio.io. 2019-02-19: [CVE-2019-9901] https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/issues/6008 was opened. This was not the first Envoy report of missing path normalization (see https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/issues/2956). Neither issue mentioned the security basis and Envoy reviewers speculated on the potential for path traversal

2019-03-08: [CVE-2019-9900] oss-fuzz reports https://bugs.chromium.org/p/oss-fuzz/issues/detail?id=13613 under embargo. 2019-03-10: [CVE-2019-9900] E-mail thread on envoy-security@googlegroups.com regarding the potential effects of this bugs. While it was unclear whether there would be impact beyond some narrow circumstances, agreement was reached to start the security release process. Analysis began to determine the extent of impact on HTTP/2 and Envoy's code base was audited. 2019-03-11: [CVE-2019-9901] https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/pull/6258 was opened to address https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/issues/6008. 2019-03-13: [CVE-2019-9901] https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/pull/6258 was closed after offline discussions between Envoy security team and the author, once the Envoy security team became aware of the potential severity in the Istio setup (in particular with RBAC and Mixer in play). 2019-03-14: [CVE-2019-9900] Finding were presented to envoy-security@. A fix plan was agreed upon and a candidate fix PR was shared with the team by e-mail. At this point, no private fix repository existed. [CVE-2019-9901] The Istio fix leads initiated private work on a fix patch. Since it was likely that this would land within the 1.9.1 release window for CVE-2019-9900, CVE-2019-9901 was also scheduled for the release. sent to remind distributors to join cncf-envoy-distributors-announce@lists.cncf.io. 2019-03-20: CVEs were requested from MITRE for both issues. Draft fix PRs for CVE-2019-9900 and CVE-2019-9901 were shared on private Envoy security repository. Reviews and further development occurred over the following week. 2019-03-22: 11:20 1.9.1 security release for the two vulnerabilities was . 11:24 CVE summary details shared with cncf-envoy-distributors-announce@lists.cncf.io. 2019-03-28: Envoy security team met with a distributor to discuss their concerns over the lack of time between patch availability and the release date. We agreed that three days was insufficient and agreed to extend to a week. 13:53 A delay of the 1.9.1 release until 2019-04-05 was . 20:07 Candidate fix patches for both CVE shared with cncf-envoy-distributors-announce@lists.cncf.io. 2019-03-29: Envoy security team was contacted by a distributor regarding the permissibility of silently staging binary images in public locations in advance of the security release due to a lack of viable alternatives. The Envoy security team agreed that there was no better alternative and provided an exemption. 2019-04-02: 08:15 The increase of severity from medium to high was . This followed several days of offline discussion between Istio and Envoy teams on Istio's independent assessment of the issues as high severity, and a better awareness of how to score. What was missing was the intuition that a vulnerability can be high severity even if it only affects a rather limited number of users. 2019-04-04: 15:41 The Envoy main branch was frozen to prepare for the security release. PRs were rebased against master and prepared for the release push. 18:33 Envoy security team was contacted by a distributor who had noticed public visibility of binary images with the fix patch by other vendors. After discussion, we agreed on a general exemption for these CVEs to the embargo policy for binary images with some constraints. 19:18 cncf-envoy-distributors-announce@lists.cncf.io was e-mailed to clarify position on staging of binary images on public sites prior to the release date. A narrow set of circumstances under which this was permissible were outlined. 2019-04-05: 10:00 - 10:05 The release branch was pushed and the 1.9.1 releaes was tagged. This started the Docker build process for the release. The same PRs were pushed to master. 10:05 The Envoy 1.9.1 security release was . 10:57 The v1.9.1 image was available at https://hub.docker.com/r/envoyproxy/envoy/tags.