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Fencer Vulns
high 7.5

CVE-2025-59043 json

OpenBao vulnerable to denial of service via malicious JSON request processing

published 2025-10-17 12 mo ago modified 2026-10-19 20 d ago also BIT-openbao-2025-59043 , EUVD-2025-34895 , GHSA-g46h-2rq9-gw5m , GO-2025-4039

cvss
7.5
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.7%
EPSS 0.7% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 52%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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.

Patch / fix

  • go github.com/openbao/openbao 2.4.1
  • bitnami openbao 2.4.1
  • openbao openbao 2.4.1
  • govulncheck-vulndb openSUSE Leap 16.0 0.0.20260723T184607-160000.1.1
  • govulncheck-vulndb openSUSE Tumbleweed 0.0.20251105T184115-1.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2026:21483-1openSUSE-SU-2025:15710-1

  • openbao Alpine 3.24, Alpine 3.23, Alpine 3.22 2.4.1-r0

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2025-59043

Alpine secdb © Alpine Linux, from https://secdb.alpinelinux.org via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2025-59043 updated cvss 7.5

openbao: OpenBao vulnerable to denial of service via malicious JSON request processing

  • Red Hat All currently supported Red Hat products
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
yes
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
12 mo ago

Exploit prediction

0.69% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 52% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
GitHub 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
OSV 3.1 7.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
go github.com/openbao/openbao
<2.4.1
all versions
2.4.1
bitnami openbao
<2.4.1
2.4.1

Affected products

  • openbao openbao

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.

CPEs and fixed versions use Anchore's correction of NVD's data: Added CPE configurations because not yet analyzed by NVD.