CVE-2025-59043: openbao Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2025-59043 is a high (CVSS 7.5) Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability in openbao. EPSS estimates a 0.69% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 51.8% of scored vulnerabilities.

Timeline

1. 17-10-2025
   PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
2. 17-10-2025
   Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

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.

• CWE-400Uncontrolled Resource ConsumptionThe product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.