Envoy is a large growing community of volunteers, users, and vendors. The Envoy community has adopted this security disclosure and response policy to ensure we responsibly handle critical issues.

Security vulnerabilities should be handled quickly and sometimes privately. The primary goal of this process is to reduce the total time users are vulnerable to publicly known exploits.

The Product Security Team (PST) is responsible for organizing the entire response including internal communication and external disclosure but will need help from relevant developers to successfully run this process.

The initial Product Security Team will consist of all maintainers in the private envoy-security list. In the future we may decide to have a subset of maintainers work on security response given that this process is time consuming.

The Envoy community asks that all suspected vulnerabilities be privately and responsibly disclosed via the reporting policy.

If you know of a publicly disclosed security vulnerability please IMMEDIATELY email envoy-security to inform the Product Security Team (PST) about the vulnerability so they may start the patch, release, and communication process.

If possible the PST will ask the person making the public report if the issue can be handled via a private disclosure process (for example if the full exploit details have not yet been published). If the reporter denies the request for private disclosure, the PST will move swiftly with the fix and release process. In extreme cases GitHub can be asked to delete the issue but this generally isn't necessary and is unlikely to make a public disclosure less damaging.

For each vulnerability a member of the PST will volunteer to lead coordination with the "Fix Team" and is responsible for sending disclosure emails to the rest of the community. This lead will be referred to as the "Fix Lead."

The role of Fix Lead should rotate round-robin across the PST.

Note that given the current size of the Envoy community it is likely that the PST is the same as the "Fix team." (I.e., all maintainers). The PST may decide to bring in additional contributors for added expertise depending on the area of the code that contains the vulnerability.

All of the timelines below are suggestions and assume a private disclosure. The Fix Lead drives the schedule using their best judgment based on severity and development time. If the Fix Lead is dealing with a public disclosure all timelines become ASAP (assuming the vulnerability has a CVSS score >= 4; see below). If the fix relies on another upstream project's disclosure timeline, that will adjust the process as well. We will work with the upstream project to fit their timeline and best protect our users.

If the vulnerability affects the last point release version, e.g. 1.10, then the full security release process described in this document will be activated. A security point release will be created for 1.10, e.g. 1.10.1, together with a fix to master if necessary. Older point releases, e.g. 1.9, are not supported by the Envoy project and will not have any security release created.

If a security vulnerability affects only these older versions but not master or the last supported point release, the Envoy security team will share this information with the private distributor list, following the standard embargo process, but not create a security release. After the embargo expires, the vulnerability will be described as a GitHub issue. A CVE will be filed if warranted by severity.

If a vulnerability does not affect any point release but only master, additional caveats apply:

• If the issue is detected and a fix is available within 5 days of the introduction of the vulnerability, the fix will be publicly reviewed and landed on master. A courtesy e-mail will be sent to [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected] if the severity is medium or greater.
• If the vulnerability has been in existence for more than 5 days, we will activate the security release process for any medium or higher vulnerabilities. Low severity vulnerabilities will still be merged onto master as soon as a fix is available.

We advise distributors and operators working from the master branch to allow at least 3 days soak time after cutting a binary release before distribution or rollout, to allow time for our fuzzers to detect issues during their execution on ClusterFuzz. A soak period of 5 days provides an even stronger guarantee, since we will invoke the security release process for medium or higher severity issues for these older bugs.

We consider vulnerabilities leading to the compromise of data confidentiality or integrity to be our highest priority concerns. Availability, in particular in areas relating to DoS and resource exhaustion, is also a serious security concern for Envoy operators, in particular those utilizing Envoy in edge deployments.

The Envoy availability stance around CPU and memory DoS, as well as Query-of-Death (QoD), is still evolving. We will continue to iterate and fix well known resource issues in the open, e.g. overload manager and watermark improvements. We will activate the security process for disclosures that appear to present a risk profile that is significantly greater than the current Envoy availability hardening status quo. Examples of disclosures that would elicit this response:

• QoD; where a single query from a client can bring down an Envoy server.
• Highly asymmetric resource exhaustion attacks, where very little traffic can cause resource exhaustion, e.g. that delivered by a single client.

Note that we do not currently consider the default settings for Envoy to be safe from an availability perspective. It is necessary for operators to explicitly configure watermarks, the overload manager, circuit breakers and other resource related features in Envoy to provide a robust availability story. We will not act on any security disclosure that relates to a lack of safe defaults. Over time, we will work towards improved safe-by-default configuration, but due to backwards compatibility and performance concerns, this will require following the breaking change deprecation policy.

These steps should be completed within the first 24 hours of disclosure.

• The Fix Lead will work quickly to identify relevant engineers from the affected projects and packages and CC those engineers into the disclosure thread. These selected developers are the Fix Team.
• The Fix Lead will get the Fix Team access to private security repos to develop the fix.

These steps should be completed within the 1-7 days of Disclosure.

• The Fix Lead and the Fix Team will create a CVSS using the CVSS Calculator. The Fix Lead makes the final call on the calculated CVSS; it is better to move quickly than making the CVSS perfect.
• The Fix Team will notify the Fix Lead that work on the fix branch is complete once there are LGTMs on all commits in the private repo from one or more maintainers.

If the CVSS score is under 4.0 (a low severity score) the Fix Team can decide to slow the release process down in the face of holidays, developer bandwidth, etc. These decisions must be discussed on the envoy-security mailing list.

A two week window will be provided to members of the private distributor list from candidate patch availability until the security release date. It is expected that distributors will normally be able to perform a release within this time window. If there are exceptional circumstances, the Envoy security team will raise this window to four weeks. The release window will be reduced if the security issue is public or embargo is broken.

With the fix development underway, the Fix Lead needs to come up with an overall communication plan for the wider community. This Disclosure process should begin after the Fix Team has developed a Fix or mitigation so that a realistic timeline can be communicated to users.

Disclosure of Forthcoming Fix to Users (Completed within 1-7 days of Disclosure)

• The Fix Lead will email [email protected] informing users that a security vulnerability has been disclosed and that a fix will be made available at YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM UTC in the future via this list. This time is the Release Date.
• The Fix Lead will include any mitigating steps users can take until a fix is available.

The communication to users should be actionable. They should know when to block time to apply patches, understand exact mitigation steps, etc.

Optional Fix Disclosure to Private Distributors List (Completed within 1-14 days of Disclosure):

• The Fix Lead will make a determination with the help of the Fix Team if an issue is critical enough to require early disclosure to distributors. Generally this Private Distributor Disclosure process should be reserved for remotely exploitable or privilege escalation issues. Otherwise, this process can be skipped.
• The Fix Lead will email the patches to [email protected] so distributors can prepare builds to be available to users on the day of the issue's announcement. Distributors should read about the Private Distributors List to find out the requirements for being added to this list.
• What if a vendor breaks embargo? The PST will assess the damage. The Fix Lead will make the call to release earlier or continue with the plan. When in doubt push forward and go public ASAP.

Fix Release Day (Completed within 1-21 days of Disclosure)

• The maintainers will create a new patch release branch from the latest patch release tag + the fix from the security branch. As a practical example if v1.5.3 is the latest patch release in Envoy.git a new branch will be created called v1.5.4 which includes only patches required to fix the issue.
• The Fix Lead will cherry-pick the patches onto the master branch and all relevant release branches. The Fix Team will LGTM and merge. Maintainers will merge these PRs as quickly as possible. Changes shouldn't be made to the commits even for a typo in the CHANGELOG as this will change the git sha of the commits leading to confusion and potentially conflicts as the fix is cherry-picked around branches.
• The Fix Lead will request a CVE from DWF and include the CVSS and release details.
• The Fix Lead will email envoy-{dev,users,announce}@googlegroups.com now that everything is public announcing the new releases, the CVE number, and the relevant merged PRs to get wide distribution and user action. As much as possible this email should be actionable and include links on how to apply the fix to user's environments; this can include links to external distributor documentation.
• The Fix Lead will remove the Fix Team from the private security repo.

These steps should be completed 1-3 days after the Release Date. The retrospective process should be blameless.

• The Fix Lead will send a retrospective of the process to [email protected] including details on everyone involved, the timeline of the process, links to relevant PRs that introduced the issue, if relevant, and any critiques of the response and release process.
• Maintainers and Fix Team are also encouraged to send their own feedback on the process to [email protected]. Honest critique is the only way we are going to get good at this as a community.

This list is intended to be used primarily to provide actionable information to multiple distribution vendors at once. This list is not intended for individuals to find out about security issues.

The information members receive on cncf-envoy-distributors-announce must not be made public, shared, nor even hinted at anywhere beyond the need-to-know within your specific team except with the list's explicit approval. This holds true until the public disclosure date/time that was agreed upon by the list. Members of the list and others may not use the information for anything other than getting the issue fixed for your respective distribution's users.

Before any information from the list is shared with respective members of your team required to fix said issue, they must agree to the same terms and only find out information on a need-to-know basis.

We typically expect a single point-of-contact (PoC) at any given legal entity. Within the organization, it is the responsibility of the PoC to share CVE and related patches internally. This should be performed on a strictly need-to-know basis with affected groups to the extent that this is technically plausible. All teams should be aware of the embargo conditions and accept them. Ultimately, if an organization breaks embargo transitively through such sharing, they will lose the early disclosure privilege, so it's in their best interest to carefully share information internally, following best practices and use their judgement in balancing the tradeoff between protecting users and maintaining confidentiality.

The embargo applies to information shared, source code and binary images. It is a violation of the embargo policy to share binary distributions of the security fixes before the public release date. This includes, but is not limited to, Envoy binaries and Docker images. It is expected that distributors have a method to stage and validate new binaries without exposing them publicly.

If the information shared is under embargo from a third party, where Envoy is one of many projects that a disclosure is shared with, it is critical to consider that the ramifications of any leak will extend beyond the Envoy community and will leave us in a position in which we will be less likely to receive embargoed reports in the future.

In the unfortunate event you share the information beyond what is allowed by this policy, you must urgently inform the [email protected] mailing list of exactly what information leaked and to whom. A retrospective will take place after the leak so we can assess how to prevent making the same mistake in the future.

If you continue to leak information and break the policy outlined here, you will be removed from the list.

This is a team effort. As a member of the list you must carry some water. This could be in the form of the following:

Technical

• Review and/or test the proposed patches and point out potential issues with them (such as incomplete fixes for the originally reported issues, additional issues you might notice, and newly introduced bugs), and inform the list of the work done even if no issues were encountered.

Administrative

• Help draft emails to the public disclosure mailing list.
• Help with release notes.

To be eligible for the cncf-envoy-distributors-announce mailing list, your distribution should:

1. Be either:

   1. An actively maintained distribution of Envoy components. An example is "SuperAwesomeLinuxDistro" which offers Envoy pre-built packages. Another example is "SuperAwesomeServiceMesh" which offers a service mesh product that includes Envoy as a component.

   OR

   2. Offer Envoy as a publicly available infrastructure or platform service, in which the product clearly states (e.g. public documentation, blog posts, marketing copy, etc.) that it is built on top of Envoy. E.g., "SuperAwesomeCloudProvider's Envoy as a Service (EaaS)". An infrastructure service that uses Envoy for a product but does not publicly say they are using Envoy does not qualify. This is essentially IaaS or PaaS, if you use Envoy to support a SaaS, e.g. "SuperAwesomeCatVideoService", this does not qualify.

2. Have a user or customer base not limited to your own organization. We will use the size of the user or customer base as part of the criteria to determine eligibility.

3. Have a publicly verifiable track record up to present day of fixing security issues.

4. Not be a downstream or rebuild of another distribution.

5. Be a participant and active contributor in the community.

6. Accept the Embargo Policy that is outlined above. You must have a way to privately stage and validate your updates that does not violate the embargo.

7. Be willing to contribute back as outlined above.

8. Be able to perform a security release of your product within a two week window from candidate fix patch availability.

9. Have someone already on the list vouch for the person requesting membership on behalf of your distribution.

10. Nominate an e-mail alias or list for your organization to receive updates. This should not be an individual user address, but instead a list that can be maintained by your organization as individuals come and go. A good example is [email protected], a bad example is [email protected]. You must accept the invite sent to this address or you will not receive any e-mail updates. This e-mail address will be shared with the Envoy community.

Note that Envoy maintainers are members of the Envoy security team. Members of the Envoy security team and the organizations that they represents are implicitly included in the private distributor list. These organizations do not need to meet the above list of criteria with the exception of the acceptance of the embargo policy.

New membership requests are sent to [email protected].

In the body of your request please specify how you qualify and fulfill each criterion listed in Membership Criteria.

Here is a pseudo example:

To: [email protected]
Subject: Seven-Corp Membership to cncf-envoy-distributors-announce

Below are each criterion and why I think we, Seven-Corp, qualify.

> 1. Be an actively maintained distribution of Envoy components OR offer Envoy as a publicly
     available service in which the product clearly states that it is built on top of Envoy.

We distribute the "Seven" distribution of Envoy [link]. We have been doing
this since 1999 before proxies were even cool.

> 2. Have a user or customer base not limited to your own organization. Please specify an
>    approximate size of your user or customer base, including the number of
>    production deployments.

Our user base spans of the extensive "Seven" community. We have a slack and
GitHub repos and mailing lists where the community hangs out. We have ~2000
customers, of which approximately 400 are using Seven in production. [links]

> 3. Have a publicly verifiable track record up to present day of fixing security
     issues.

We announce on our blog all upstream patches we apply to "Seven." [link to blog
posts]

> 4. Not be a downstream or rebuild of another distribution. If you offer Envoy as a publicly
>    available infrastructure or platform service, this condition does not need to apply.

This does not apply, "Seven" is a unique snowflake distribution.

> 5. Be a participant and active contributor in the community.

Our members, Acidburn, Cereal, and ZeroCool are outstanding members and are well
known throughout the Envoy community. Especially for their contributions
in hacking the Gibson.

> 6. Accept the Embargo Policy that is outlined above. You must
     have a way to privately stage and validate your updates that does not violate
     the embargo.

We accept.

> 7. Be willing to contribute back as outlined above.

We are definitely willing to help!

> 8. Be able to perform a security release of your product within a two week window from candidate fix
     patch availability.

We affirm we can spin out new security releases within a 2 week window.

> 9. Have someone already on the list vouch for the person requesting membership
>    on behalf of your distribution.

CrashOverride will vouch for the "Seven" distribution joining the distribution list.

> 10. Nominate an e-mail alias or list for your organization to receive updates. This should not be
      an individual user address, but instead a list that can be maintained by your organization as
      individuals come and go. A good example is [email protected], a bad example is
      [email protected]. You must accept the invite sent to this address or you will not receive any
      e-mail updates. This e-mail address will be shared with the Envoy community.