CVE-2026-4525

Vault and Vault Enterprise did not consistently evaluate ACL policies against the canonical form of resource and policy names. This may allow an authenticated user with delegated permissions to bypass an explicit deny restriction and access a protected resource or assign a denied policy, potentially leading to privilege escalation. This vulnerability (CVE-2026-89322) is fixed in Vault Community Edition 2.1.2, and Vault Enterprise 2.1.2, 1.21.12, 1.20.17, and 1.19.23.

Vault's ACL policy cache allowed namespace traversal when policy names contained path traversal constructs. This may allow a token assigned specially crafted policy names to use the capabilities of policies defined in other namespaces, including the root namespace. This vulnerability is fixed in Vault Enterprise 2.1.2, 1.21.12, 1.20.17, and 1.19.23. Vault Community Edition does not support namespaces and is not affected.

Vault's PKI secrets engine ACME server did not restrict certificate identities that ACME challenges do not validate when issuing certificates under the default directory policy. This may allow an ACME client to obtain a certificate containing unverified identity claims, potentially enabling impersonation toward systems that trust certificates issued by the affected Vault PKI mount. This vulnerability is fixed in Vault Community Edition 2.1.2, and Vault Enterprise 2.1.2, 1.21.12, 1.20.17, and 1.19.23.

Vault and Vault Enterprise did not consistently verify that stored plugin catalog entries reference binaries within the configured plugin directory. When Vault uses Shamir seals and has an external plugin directory configured, a privileged operator able to restore an Integrated Storage (Raft) snapshot may be able to execute arbitrary code on the Vault host. This vulnerability is fixed in Vault Community Edition 2.1.2, and Vault Enterprise 2.1.2, 1.21.12, 1.20.17, and 1.19.23.

Vault's ACL policy engine did not consistently enforce a wildcard (glob) deny rule against LIST requests made with a trailing slash on the denied path. A token with a broader allow rule and a narrower wildcard deny rule may enumerate entry names beneath a path it was intended to be denied access to.

Vault is vulnerable to a denial-of-service condition where an unauthenticated attacker can repeatedly initiate or cancel root token generation or rekey operations, occupying the single in-progress operation slot. This prevents legitimate operators from completing these workflows.