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 in Vault Community 1.18.1 and Vault Enterprise 1.18.1, 1.17.8, and 1.16.12.

CVSS 3.1

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Severity from

GitHub (reviewed advisory)

Weakness

CWE-636

Also known as

BIT-openbao-2024-8185, BIT-vault-2024-8185, CVE-2024-8185, GO-2024-3246

• nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2024-8185
• github.com/hashicorp/vault/commit/195dfca433028887973f5bd82d173d91fe9dab4a
• discuss.hashicorp.com/t/hcsec-2024-26-vault-vulnerable-to-denial-of-service-through-memory-exhaustion-when-processing-raft-cluster-join-requests/71047
• github.com/hashicorp/vault
• openbao.org/docs/release-notes/2-0-0/#203