CVE-2021-42135 Incorrect Privilege Assignment in HashiCorp Vault

What is CVE-2021-42135?

CVE-2021-42135 is a high-severity vulnerability in Hashicorp Vault, published on 11 Oct 2021. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

HashiCorp Vault and Vault Enterprise 1.8.x through 1.8.4 may have an unexpected interaction between glob-related policies and the Google Cloud secrets engine. Users may, in some situations, have more privileges than intended, e.g., a user with read permission for the /gcp/roleset/* path may be able to issue Google Cloud service account credentials.

Weakness: CWE-269

Which versions are affected by CVE-2021-42135?

4 open source packages ship an affected version, including github.com/hashicorp/vault and vault. It affects 1 product.

Products include Hashicorp Vault.

How do I fix CVE-2021-42135?

Upgrade github.com/hashicorp/vault to 1.8.5 or later.

Is CVE-2021-42135 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-42135 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Hashicorp Vault

• CVE-2020-35192 Hardcoded credentials in n/a Critical 9.8
• CVE-2020-12757 Improper Input Validation in HashiCorp Vault Critical 9.8
• CVE-2025-6000 Arbitrary Remote Code Execution via Plugin Catalog Abuse Critical 9.1
• CVE-2022-40186 HashiCorp Vault vulnerable to incorrect metadata access Critical 9.1
• CVE-2022-36129 Missing authorization in n/a Critical 9.1

All Hashicorp Vault vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as BIT-vault-2021-42135, GHSA-362v-wg5p-64w2, GO-2022-0578.