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.

In Envoy through 1.11.1, users may configure a route to match incoming path headers via the libstdc++ regular expression implementation. A remote attacker may send a request with a very long URI to result in a denial of service (memory consumption). This is a related issue to CVE-2019-14993.

Envoy 1.9.0 and before does not normalize HTTP URL paths. A remote attacker may craft a relative path, e.g., something/../admin, to bypass access control, e.g., a block on /admin. A backend server could then interpret the non-normalized path and provide an attacker access beyond the scope provided for by the access control policy.

When parsing HTTP/1.x header values, Envoy 1.9.0 and before does not reject embedded zero characters (NUL, ASCII 0x0). This allows remote attackers crafting header values containing embedded NUL characters to potentially bypass header matching rules, gaining access to unauthorized resources.