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

• Severity: medium (CVSS 4.7 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2023-03-30 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-208

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.

Affected products

• HashiCorp Vault: before 1.11.9; from 1.12.0 before 1.12.5; from 1.13.0 before 1.13.1 — fixed in 1.11.9, 1.12.5, 1.13.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: HashiCorp Vault 1.11.9, 1.12.5, 1.13.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/hcsec-2023-10-vault-vulnerable-to-cache-timing-attacks-during-seal-and-unseal-operations/52078
• https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20230526-0008/
• https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/hcsec-2023-10-vault-vulnerable-to-cache-timing-attacks-during-seal-and-unseal-operations/52078
• https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20230526-0008/

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