Advisories for Golang/Github.com/Openbao/Openbao package

2025

OpenBao is Vulnerable to Privileged Operator Identity Group Root Escalation

Similar to HCSEC-2025-13 / CVE-2025-5999, a privileged operator could use the identity group subsystem to add a root policy to a group identity group, escalating their or another user's permissions in the system. Specifically this is an issue when: An operator in the root namespace has access to identity/groups endpoints. An operator does not have policy access. Otherwise, an operator with policy access could create or modify an existing policy …

OpenBao leaks HTTPRawBody in Audit Logs

OpenBao's audit log experienced a regression wherein raw HTTP bodies used by few endpoints were not correctly redacted (HMAC'd). This impacted the following subsystems: When using the ACME functionality of PKI, this would result in short-lived ACME verification challenge codes being leaked in the audit logs. When using the OIDC issuer functionality of the identity subsystem, auth and token response codes along with claims could be leaked in the audit …

OpenBao and Vault Leak []byte Fields in Audit Logs

OpenBao's audit log did not appropriately redact fields when relevant subsystems sent []byte response parameters rather than strings. This includes, but is not limited to: sys/raw with use of encoding=base64, all data would be emitted unredacted to the audit log. Transit, when performing a signing operation with a derived Ed25519 key, would emit public keys to the audit log. Third-party plugins may be affected. This issue has been present since …

OpenBao has potential Denial of Service vulnerability when processing malicious unauthenticated JSON requests

JSON objects after decoding might use more memory than their serialized version. It is possible to tune a JSON to maximize the factor between serialized memory usage and deserialized memory usage (similar to a zip bomb). While reproducing the issue, we could reach a factor of about 35. This can be used to circumvent the [max_request_size (https://openbao.org/docs/configuration/listener/tcp/) configuration parameter, which is meant to protect against Denial of Service attacks, and …

Privileged OpenBao Operator May Execute Code on the Underlying Host

Under certain threat models, OpenBao operators with privileged API access may not be system administrators and thus normally lack the ability to update binaries or execute code on the system. Additionally, privileged API operators should be unable to perform TCP connections to arbitrary hosts in the environment OpenBao is executing within. The API-driven audit subsystem granted privileged API operators the ability to do both with an attacker-controlled log prefix. Access …

OpenBao Root Namespace Operator May Elevate Token Privileges

Accounts with access to the highly-privileged identity entity system in the root namespace may increase their scope directly to the root policy. While the identity system always allowed adding arbitrary policies, which in turn could contain capability grants on arbitrary paths, the root policy is restricted to manual generation using unseal or recovery key shares. The global root policy is not accessible from child namespaces.

2024

Hashicorp Vault vulnerable to denial of service through memory exhaustion

Vault Community and Vault Enterprise (“Vault”) clusters using Vault’s Integrated Storage backend are vulnerable to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack through memory exhaustion through a Raft cluster join API endpoint. An attacker may send a large volume of requests to the endpoint which may cause Vault to consume excessive system memory resources, potentially leading to a crash of the underlying system and the Vault process itself. This vulnerability, CVE-2024-8185, is fixed …

Vault SSH Secrets Engine Configuration Did Not Restrict Valid Principals By Default

Vault’s SSH secrets engine did not require the valid_principals list to contain a value by default. If the valid_principals and default_user fields of the SSH secrets engine configuration are not set, an SSH certificate requested by an authorized user to Vault’s SSH secrets engine could be used to authenticate as any user on the host. Fixed in Vault Community Edition 1.17.6, and in Vault Enterprise 1.17.6, 1.16.10, and 1.15.15.