CVE-2023-25000 Vault Vulnerable to Cache-Timing Attacks During Seal and Unseal Operations

What is CVE-2023-25000?

CVE-2023-25000 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Hashicorp Vault, published on 30 Mar 2023. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

HashiCorp Vault's implementation of Shamir's secret sharing used precomputed table lookups, and was vulnerable to cache-timing attacks. An attacker with access to, and the ability to observe a large number of unseal operations on the host through a side channel may reduce the search space of a brute force effort to recover the Shamir shares. Fixed in Vault 1.13.1, 1.12.5, and 1.11.9.

Weakness: CWE-203, CWE-208

Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-25000?

8 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-2023-25000?

Upgrade github.com/hashicorp/vault to a fixed version for your release line: 1.11.9, 1.12.5 or 1.13.1.

Is CVE-2023-25000 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-25000 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-2023-25000, GHSA-vq4h-9ghm-qmrr, GO-2023-1709.