CVE-2026-53717
Description
A flaw was found in Envoy Gateway. A remote attacker, by providing a specially crafted OCI (Open Container Initiative) image with a malicious tar header, could cause the extractWasmPluginBinary function to allocate an excessive amount of memory. This uncontrolled memory allocation can lead to an unrecoverable out-of-memory error, resulting in a cluster-wide denial of service for the Envoy Gateway control plane.
Statement
Red Hat rates this vulnerability as Moderate because exploitation requires authenticated tenant privileges to manage custom resources within the cluster, as well as controller egress to an external container registry. In Red Hat Connectivity Link deployments, an authorized user can configure an EnvoyExtensionPolicy to fetch a malformed WebAssembly layer, triggering memory exhaustion in the shared controller pod. While the resulting crash loop creates a denial of service across the control plane, it does not enable arbitrary code execution or compromise data confidentiality and integrity.
Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details
Info alert:Important note
CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authority (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications).
The following CVSS metrics and score provided are preliminary and subject to review.
CVSS v3 Score Breakdown
| Red Hat | NVD | cve.org | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base Score | 6.5 | N/A | 6.5 |
| Attack Vector | Network | N/A | Network |
| Attack Complexity | Low | N/A | Low |
| Privileges Required | Low | N/A | Low |
| User Interaction | None | N/A | None |
| Scope | Unchanged | N/A | Unchanged |
| Confidentiality | None | N/A | None |
| Integrity Impact | None | N/A | None |
| Availability Impact | High | N/A | High |
Vector
Red Hat: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
cve.org: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Understanding the Weakness (CWE)
Other
Technical Impact: Varies by Context
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