An issue was discovered in Envoy 1.12.0. An untrusted remote client may send HTTP/2 requests that write to the heap outside of the request buffers when the upstream is HTTP/1. This may be used to corrupt nearby heap contents (leading to a query-of-death scenario) or may be used to bypass Envoy's access control mechanisms such as path based routing. An attacker can also modify requests from other users that happen to be proximal temporally and spatially.

Upon receiving each incoming request header data, Envoy will iterate over existing request headers to verify that the total size of the headers stays below a maximum limit. The implementation in versions 1.10.0 through 1.11.1 for HTTP/1.x traffic and all versions of Envoy for HTTP/2 traffic had O(n^2) performance characteristics. A remote attacker may craft a request that stays below the maximum request header size but consists of many thousands of small headers to consume CPU and result in a denial-of-service attack.