CVE-2025-59043: high-severity vulnerability in openbao
OpenBao vulnerable to denial of service via malicious JSON request processing
Published
E-mail alert when it lands in KEV, gets a public PoC or its score goes up.
21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 7.5epss 0.7%
OpenBao is an open source identity-based secrets management system. In OpenBao versions prior to 2.4.1, JSON objects after decoding may use significantly more memory than their serialized version. It is possible to craft a JSON payload to maximize the factor between serialized memory usage and deserialized memory usage, similar to a zip bomb, with factors reaching approximately 35. This can be used to circumvent the max_request_size configuration parameter which is intended to protect against denial of service attacks. The request body is parsed into a map very early in the request handling chain before authentication, which means an unauthenticated attacker can send a specifically crafted JSON object and cause an out-of-memory crash. Additionally, for requests with large numbers of strings, the audit subsystem can consume large quantities of CPU. The vulnerability is fixed in version 2.4.1.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Affected products
openbao · openbaoRelated CVEs — openbao
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2026-63132CRITICALOpenBao's Recovery Mode Vulnerable To Token Leakage via Timing AttackEPSS 0.6%CVE-2026-46405MEDIUMOpenBao's Kerberos Auth Method Accumulates Unaccessible TokensEPSS 0.6%CVE-2026-55776MEDIUMOpenBao: Transit secrets engine crashes on key creation with `derived: true` for asymmetric key typesEPSS 0.6%CVE-2026-55774LOWOpenBao: Cross-namespace lease revocation/renewal via canonical sys/leases/{revoke,renew} — incomplete fix of CVE-2026-45808EPSS 0.6%CVE-2026-55770MEDIUMOpenBao: LDAPi ldaputil (wrong escape func)EPSS 0.5%CVE-2026-63131MEDIUMOpenBao LIST ACL bypass: a trailing-slash LIST request skips a more-specific deny rule (unported Vault v2.0.3 fix)EPSS 0.5%
References
https://github.com/openbao/openbao/blob/788536bd3e10818a7b4fb00aac6affc23388e5a9/http/logical.go#L50https://github.com/openbao/openbao/commit/d418f238bc99adc72c73109faf574cc2b672880chttps://github.com/openbao/openbao/pull/1756https://github.com/openbao/openbao/security/advisories/GHSA-g46h-2rq9-gw5m