CVE Catalog

CVE-2025-59043

HighCVSS 7.5
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Elevated risk
0.69%

52th percentile - higher than 52% of all known CVEs

Summary

OpenBao versions prior to 2.4.1 may use significantly more memory after decoding JSON than its serialized version, similar to a zip bomb, with factors reaching approximately 35. This allows bypassing the max_request_size parameter and conducting a denial of service attack through memory exhaustion by an unauthenticated attacker, as well as increased CPU consumption in the audit subsystem.

Risk Assessment

An unauthenticated attacker can cause a service crash due to out-of-memory, leading to unavailability of the secrets management system.

Recommendation

Update OpenBao to version 2.4.1 or later, which fixes the vulnerability.

Other vulnerabilities in OpenBao

See all
Original NVD description (English source)

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.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS