CVE-2025-12044 Vault Vulnerable to Denial of Service Due to Rate Limit Regression

What is CVE-2025-12044?

CVE-2025-12044 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Hashicorp Vault, published on 23 Oct 2025. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Vault and Vault Enterprise (“Vault”) are vulnerable to an unauthenticated denial of service when processing JSON payloads. This occurs due to a regression from a previous fix for [+HCSEC-2025-24+|https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/hcsec-2025-24-vault-denial-of-service-though-complex-json-payloads/76393]  which allowed for processing JSON payloads before applying rate limits. This vulnerability, CVE-2025-12044, is fixed in Vault Community Edition 1.21.0 and Vault Enterprise 1.16.27, 1.19.11, 1.20.5, and 1.21.0.

Weakness: CWE-770

Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-12044?

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-2025-12044?

Upgrade github.com/hashicorp/vault to 1.21.0 or later.

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-2025-12044 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-12044 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-2025-12044, GHSA-vp5w-xcfc-73wf, GO-2025-4071, MINI-g359-jf68-chwg.