Bypass of path matching rules using escaped slash characters

Envoy is a cloud-native edge/middle/service proxy. Envoy does not decode escaped slash sequences %2F and %5C in HTTP URL paths in versions 1.18.2 and before. A remote attacker may craft a path with escaped slashes, e.g. /something%2F..%2Fadmin, to bypass access control, e.g. a block on /admin. A backend server could then decode slash sequences and normalize path and provide an attacker access beyond the scope provided for by the access control policy.

Impact

Escalation of Privileges when using RBAC or JWT filters with enforcement based on URL path. Users with back end servers that interpret %2F and / and %5C and \ interchangeably are impacted.

Attack

Vector URL paths containing escaped slash characters delivered by untrusted client. Patches in versions 1.18.3, 1.17.3, 1.16.4, 1.15.5 contain new path normalization option to decode escaped slash characters. As a workaround, if back end servers treat %2F and / and %5C and \ interchangeably and a URL path based access control is configured, one may reconfigure the back end server to not treat %2F and / and %5C and \ interchangeably.