What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-53719: Envoy Gateway: Nil-dereference when SecurityPolicy targets TCPRoute without spec.authorization

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-09-14 · updated 2026-09-30
• Weakness: CWE-476

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.

Affected products

• envoyproxy gateway: before 1.7.4; from 1.8.0-rc.0, < 1.8.1

References

• https://github.com/envoyproxy/gateway/commit/5a78db82b7cf4fc5bebbeda2c50952892038a464
• https://github.com/envoyproxy/gateway/commit/96e2b750868a459ace4b8b68e6a6e4fb0152b9b7
• https://github.com/envoyproxy/gateway/commit/b4737180c7e597490c6363075c565fa8cf24eead
• https://github.com/envoyproxy/gateway/pull/9171
• https://github.com/envoyproxy/gateway/pull/9172
• https://github.com/envoyproxy/gateway/pull/9173
• https://github.com/envoyproxy/gateway/releases/tag/v1.7.4
• https://github.com/envoyproxy/gateway/releases/tag/v1.8.1
• https://github.com/envoyproxy/gateway/security/advisories/GHSA-m2v6-2jmh-4c68

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