CVE-2023-6337 Vault May be Vulnerable to a Denial of Service Through Memory Exhaustion When Handling Large HTTP Requests

What is CVE-2023-6337?

CVE-2023-6337 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Hashicorp Vault, published on 8 Dec 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 1.12.0 and newer are vulnerable to a denial of service through memory exhaustion of the host when handling large unauthenticated and authenticated HTTP requests from a client. Vault will attempt to map the request to memory, resulting in the exhaustion of available memory on the host, which may cause Vault to crash.

Fixed in Vault 1.15.4, 1.14.8, 1.13.12.

Weakness: CWE-770

Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-6337?

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-2023-6337?

Upgrade github.com/hashicorp/vault to a fixed version for your release line: 1.13.12, 1.14.8 or 1.15.4.

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-2023-6337 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-6337 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 AZL-34585, BIT-vault-2023-6337, GHSA-6p62-6cg9-f5f5, GO-2023-2399.