CVE-2023-5954 Vault Requests Triggering Policy Checks May Lead To Unbounded Memory Consumption

What is CVE-2023-5954?

CVE-2023-5954 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Hashicorp Vault, published on 9 Nov 2023. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

HashiCorp Vault and Vault Enterprise inbound client requests triggering a policy check can lead to an unbounded consumption of memory. A large number of these requests may lead to denial-of-service. Fixed in Vault 1.15.2, 1.14.6, and 1.13.10.

Weakness: CWE-401

Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-5954?

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-2023-5954?

Upgrade github.com/hashicorp/vault to a fixed version for your release line: 1.13.10, 1.14.6 or 1.15.2.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2023-5954 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-5954 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-2023-5954, GHSA-4qhc-v8r6-8vwm, GO-2023-2329.