CVE-2025-59043OpenBao vulnerable to denial of service via malicious JSON request processing
- 7.5HighCVSS base score
- 0.69%Exploitation in 30 daysEPSS · top 47% of all CVEs
- NoKnown exploitednot in CISA's KEV catalog
- NonePublic exploitsnone known yet
Description
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.
Timeline
ID reserved
By GitHub_M
- 39 days later
· 39 days later
Published
Changes after publication (a new score, a public exploit, EPSS crossing 1, 10 or 50 %, leaving KEV) are kept since November 2026; earlier ones are not known.
Scores
| Scored by | CVSS | Score | Vector |
|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub_MCNA (assigner) | 3.1 | High7.5 | CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H |
| NVDNVD · Analyzed | 3.1 | High7.5 | CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H |
- EPSS (exploitation in 30 days)
- 0.69% · top 47% of all CVEs (15 Nov 2026)
- CISA SSVC
- Exploitation: none · Automatable: yes · Technical impact: partial
The list uses the assigner's score when there is one, then CISA's, then NVD's: High 7.5.
Affected products
Affected packages
From reviewed advisories of the GitHub Advisory Database.
- Gogithub.com/openbao/openbaoGHSA-g46h-2rq9-gw5m (opens in a new tab)
References
References4
- https://github.com/openbao/openbao/security/advisories/GHSA-g46h-2rq9-gw5m (opens in a new tab)x_refsource_CONFIRM
- https://github.com/openbao/openbao/pull/1756 (opens in a new tab)x_refsource_MISC
- https://github.com/openbao/openbao/commit/d418f238bc99adc72c73109faf574cc2b672880c (opens in a new tab)x_refsource_MISC
- https://github.com/openbao/openbao/blob/788536bd3e10818a7b4fb00aac6affc23388e5a9/http/logical.go#L50 (opens in a new tab)x_refsource_MISC
Sources
The same CVE in the primary databases and aggregators, to check against.
- CVE.org record (opens in a new tab)
- CVE List JSON (GitHub) (opens in a new tab)
- NVD (opens in a new tab)
- FIRST EPSS (opens in a new tab)
- EUVD EUVD-2025-34895 (opens in a new tab)
- OSV.dev (opens in a new tab)
- GitHub Advisory GHSA-g46h-2rq9-gw5m (opens in a new tab)
- CIRCL Vulnerability-Lookup (opens in a new tab)
Badge for a README or a ticket
[](https://cveledger.app/cve/CVE-2025-59043)Record last updated .