What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-54998: OpenBao Userpass and LDAP User Lockout Bypass

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 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: 2025-08-09 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-307

Description

OpenBao exists to provide a software solution to manage, store, and distribute sensitive data including secrets, certificates, and keys. In versions 0.1.0 through 2.3.1, attackers could bypass the automatic user lockout mechanisms in the OpenBao Userpass or LDAP auth systems. This was caused by different aliasing between pre-flight and full login request user entity alias attributions. This is fixed in version 2.3.2. To work around this issue, existing users may apply rate-limiting quotas on the authentication endpoints:, see https://openbao.org/api-docs/system/rate-limit-quotas/.

Affected products

• openbao: before 2.3.2 — fixed in 2.3.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: openbao 2.3.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/hcsec-2025-16-vault-userpass-and-ldap-user-lockout-bypass/76035
• https://github.com/openbao/openbao/commit/c52795c1ef746c7f2c510f9225aa8ccbbd44f9fc
• https://github.com/openbao/openbao/security/advisories/GHSA-j3xv-7fxp-gfhx

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