GHSA-hrxh-6v49-42gf found in golang/google.golang.org/grpc@v1.80.0

GHSA-hrxh-6v49-42gf found in golang/google.golang.org/grpc@v1.80.0

[!important]
Risk: 2.30 (Low)
CVSS: 8.8

Description

Multiple security vulnerabilities have been identified and addressed in grpc-go affecting the xDS RBAC authorization engine (internal/xds/rbac) and the HTTP/2 transport server implementation (internal/transport). These vulnerabilities could result in:

• Authorization Bypass (Fail-Open) when translating xDS RBAC policies containing Metadata or RequestedServerName fields.
• Denial of Service (High CPU Consumption) due to an HTTP/2 Rapid Reset mitigation bypass during client-initiated stream resets.
• Denial of Service (Server Panic) when parsing crafted xDS RBAC policies containing NOT rules around unsupported fields.

Impact

What kind of vulnerability is it? Who is impacted?

xDS RBAC Authorization Bypass via Metadata & RequestedServerName matchers

• Affected Component: xDS RBAC
• Impact: When building policy matchers for gRPC RBAC from xDS configurations, unsupported permission and principal rules (specifically Metadata and RequestedServerName) were silently ignored and treated as no-ops.
  • If an authorization policy relied purely on these matchers for access control, treating those rules as no-ops effectively removed the restrictions.
• If these unsupported rules were nested inside logical NOT rules (Permission_NotRule / Principal_NotId) or multi-condition OR/AND rules, silently dropping them changed the boolean logic flow of the authorization engine.

As a result, policy evaluation decisions could fail open, allowing unauthorized clients to access protected gRPC services or resources.

HTTP/2 Rapid Reset Mitigation Bypass / Denial of Service via Stream Aborts

• Affected Component: HTTP/2 transport
• Impact: Earlier mitigations in grpc-go for HTTP/2 Rapid Reset only applied threshold checks to items that directly resulted in control frames being written back to the wire, such as SETTINGS ACKs or server-initiated RST_STREAMs.

When a client initiated a rapid flood of stream creation (HEADERS) immediately followed by stream termination RST_STREAM, items queued up in the control buffer without counting against the transport response frame threshold. An attacker can repeatedly trigger this flood sequence to bypass reader blocking, resulting in high CPU usage, and Denial of Service (DoS).

Denial of Service (Panic) in xDS RBAC Engine via Unsupported Fields inside NOT Rules

• Affected Component: xDS RBAC
• Impact: The xDS RBAC policy translators recursively generate matchers for nested rules. When a NOT rule wrapped an unsupported or unhandled field (such as SourcedMetadata), the recursive step returned an empty matcher. This could result in a runtime panic when the RBAC engine attempts to authorize an incoming request.

An attacker or misconfigured/malicious xDS management server delivering an LDS/RDS update containing a NOT rule around an unhandled field causes the gRPC server process to crash immediately (CWE-248 / Denial of Service).

Patches

Has the problem been patched? What versions should users upgrade to?

All three issues have been fixed in master and will be released in 1.82.1 shortly.

Workarounds

Is there a way for users to fix or remediate the vulnerability without upgrading?

If upgrading grpc-go immediately is not possible, apply the following workarounds based on your deployment architecture:

• For xDS RBAC Vulnerabilities & Panics: Ensure that upstream xDS management servers do not push RBAC policies containing Metadata, RequestedServerName, or NOT rules wrapping unsupported fields (such as SourcedMetadata) to grpc-go servers.
• For HTTP/2 Rapid Reset DOS: Configure upstream reverse proxies or load balancers (such as Envoy) with strict HTTP/2 max_concurrent_streams limits and active rate limiting on RST_STREAM frequency per connection.

Severity

Affected component

The vulnerability is in pkg:golang/google.golang.org/grpc@v1.80.0, found in artifacts pkg:oci/devguard-k8s-image-inventory?repository_url=ghcr.io/l3montree-dev/devguard-k8s-image-inventory&arch=amd64&tag=main-amd64, pkg:oci/devguard-k8s-image-inventory?repository_url=ghcr.io/l3montree-dev/devguard-k8s-image-inventory&arch=arm64&tag=main-arm64.

Recommended fix

Upgrade to version v1.82.1 or later.

# Update all golang packages
go get -u ./... 
# Update only this package
go get grpc@v1.82.1 

Additional guidance for mitigating vulnerabilities

Visit our guides on devguard.org

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 flowchart TD
Your_application(["Your application"]) --- pkg_golang_google_golang_org_grpc_v1_80_0(["pkg:golang/google.golang.org/grpc\@v1.80.0"])

classDef default stroke-width:2px

Interact with this vulnerability

You can use the following slash commands to interact with this vulnerability:

👍 Reply with this to acknowledge and accept the identified risk.

/accept I accept the risk of this vulnerability, because ...

⚠️ Mark the risk as false positive: Use one of these commands if you believe the reported vulnerability is not actually a valid issue.

/component-not-present The vulnerable component is not included in the artifact.

/vulnerable-code-not-present The component is present, but the vulnerable code is not included or compiled.

/vulnerable-code-not-in-execute-path The vulnerable code exists, but is never executed at runtime.

/vulnerable-code-cannot-be-controlled-by-adversary Built-in protections prevent exploitation of this vulnerability.

/inline-mitigations-already-exist The vulnerable code cannot be controlled or influenced by an attacker.

🔁 Reopen the risk: Use this command to reopen a previously closed or accepted vulnerability.

/reopen ... 

Start by locating the Go dependency definition for google.golang.org/grpc and confirm that v1.80.0 is included in the affected artifacts. Update it to v1.82.1 or later, then run the repository's dependency checks or vulnerability scan to verify the reported risk is resolved.