CVE-2022-21657

X.509 Extended Key Usage and Trust Purposes bypass in Envoy

MEDIUM
6.5
CVSS Score
Published: February 22, 2022 at 10:30 PM UTC
Updated: June 17, 2026 at 04:26 AM UTC
1 product affected across 1 vendorEnvoy

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Severity
MEDIUM6.5
Exploit prediction
EPSS 0.5%
SSVC
No known exploit

Description

Envoy is an open source edge and service proxy, designed for cloud-native applications. In affected versions Envoy does not restrict the set of certificates it accepts from the peer, either as a TLS client or a TLS server, to only those certificates that contain the necessary extendedKeyUsage (id-kp-serverAuth and id-kp-clientAuth, respectively). This means that a peer may present an e-mail certificate (e.g. id-kp-emailProtection), either as a leaf certificate or as a CA in the chain, and it will be accepted for TLS. This is particularly bad when combined with the issue described in pull request #630, in that it allows a Web PKI CA that is intended only for use with S/MIME, and thus exempted from audit or supervision, to issue TLS certificates that will be accepted by Envoy. As a result Envoy will trust upstream certificates that should not be trusted. There are no known workarounds to this issue. Users are advised to upgrade.

Affected

Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.

v < 1.18.6v < 1.19.3v < 1.20.21.19.0 ≤ v < 1.19.31.20.0 ≤ v < 1.20.2
Affected range stops below 1.18.6, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement
Affected range stops below 1.19.3, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement
Affected range stops below 1.20.2, so it looks safe — our inference, not a vendor statement

Remediation

No guide yet

No remediation guidance has been written for this CVE yet. What the record does show:

References (2)

x_refsource_MISCPatchThird Party Advisory
https://github.com/envoyproxy/envoy/pull/630

SSVC — Action Prioritization

SSVCNo known exploitNot automatableTotal impact

SSVC signals action urgency (what to patch first), separate from CVSS which measures severity.

CVSS

Attack Vector
NETWORK
Complexity
LOW
Privileges
LOW
User Interaction
NONE
Scope
UNCHANGED
Confidentiality
NONE
Integrity
HIGH
Availability
NONE
Vector?

Quick Info

StatusMODIFIED
CWE
CWE-295

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