CVE-2026-53719

Received Received - Intake

Denial of Service in Envoy Gateway

Publication date: 2026-09-14

Last updated on: 2026-09-14

Assigner: GitHub, Inc.

Description

Envoy Gateway is an open source project for managing Envoy Proxy as a standalone or Kubernetes-based application gateway. Prior to 1.7.4 and 1.8.1, translateSecurityPolicyForRoute in internal/gatewayapi/securitypolicy.go dereferences a nil authorization value when a namespace-scoped tenant creates a SecurityPolicy targeting a TCPRoute and omits spec.authorization. The persistent object triggers the panic on every reconcile; recovery in message/watchutil.go keeps the process alive but unwinds the runner/runner.go handle callback, stalling controller-wide xDS and infrastructure intermediate-representation publishing until an administrator deletes the object. The data plane continues to serve the last known good configuration while publication is stalled. This issue is fixed in versions 1.7.4 and 1.8.1.

CVSS Scores

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Meta Information

Published

2026-09-14

Last Modified

2026-09-14

Generated

2026-09-15

AI Q&A

2026-09-15

EPSS Evaluated

N/A

NVD

CVE-2026-53719

Affected Vendors & Products

Vendor	Product	Version / Range
envoy	gateway	to 1.8.1 (exc)

Helpful Resources

Exploitability

CWE

KEV

CWE ID	Description
CWE-476	The product dereferences a pointer that it expects to be valid but is NULL.

Attack-Flow Graph

Executive Summary

Envoy Gateway before versions 1.7.4 and 1.8.1 has a flaw where translateSecurityPolicyForRoute dereferences a nil authorization value. This happens when a namespace-scoped tenant creates a SecurityPolicy targeting a TCPRoute without specifying spec.authorization. The nil dereference causes a panic during reconciliation, stalling the controller's xDS publishing until the problematic object is manually deleted.

Detection Guidance

The vulnerability triggers a panic in Envoy Gateway when a namespace-scoped tenant creates a SecurityPolicy targeting a TCPRoute without specifying spec.authorization. Check Envoy Gateway logs for repeated panics or stalled xDS publishing. Look for SecurityPolicy objects targeting TCPRoute without authorization fields.

Impact Analysis

The vulnerability stalls the controller-wide xDS and infrastructure publishing, halting new configuration updates. The data plane continues serving the last known good configuration, but no new changes are applied. This can disrupt traffic routing and security policies until the issue is resolved by deleting the problematic SecurityPolicy object.

Mitigation Strategies

Upgrade Envoy Gateway to version 1.7.4 or 1.8.1 or later. Review and delete any SecurityPolicy objects targeting TCPRoute that lack spec.authorization. Monitor controller logs for xDS publishing stalls or panics.

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