Medium [CVE-2026-48706] Envoy Heap Buffer Overflow in TcpStatsdSink

Envoy is an open source edge and service proxy designed for cloud-native applications. From 1.34.0 until 1.35.13, 1.36.9, 1.37.5, and 1.38.3, a vulnerability exists in Envoy's TCP StatsD sink (TcpStatsdSink), where the thread-local flusher buffer can be overflowed by exceptionally long statistic names (e.g., >16KiB).

During formatting, TcpStatsdSink reserves a single contiguous memory slice of 16KiB (FLUSH_SLICE_SIZE_BYTES). If formatting a single metric exceeds the remaining capacity, the flusher initiates a buffer rotation but incorrectly continues to allocate another fixed 16KiB slice.

If an attacker can trigger a statistic name longer than 16KiB—for example, by sending an HTTP or gRPC request with an extremely long request path (:path) that is recorded by the grpc_stats filter configured with stats_for_all_methods: true—the flusher will attempt to copy the metric name using memcpy operations beyond the allocated heap buffer boundaries.

This leads to a heap write overflow, which can cause immediate denial-of-service (process crash) or potential remote code execution (RCE). This vulnerability is fixed in 1.35.13, 1.36.9, 1.37.5, and 1.38.3.

An attacker can exploit a heap write overflow vulnerability in Envoy's TCP StatsD sink by sending exceptionally long statistic names, such as those found in HTTP or gRPC request paths.