What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-55001: OpenBao LDAP MFA Enforcement Bypass When Using Username As Alias

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 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-156

Description

OpenBao exists to provide a software solution to manage, store, and distribute sensitive data including secrets, certificates, and keys. In versions 2.3.1 and below, OpenBao allowed the assignment of policies and MFA attribution based upon entity aliases, chosen by the underlying auth method. When the username_as_alias=true parameter in the LDAP auth method was in use, the caller-supplied username was used verbatim without normalization, allowing an attacker to bypass alias-specific MFA requirements. This issue was fixed in version 2.3.2. To work around this, remove all usage of the username_as_alias=true parameter and update any entity aliases accordingly.

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-2025-20-vault-ldap-mfa-enforcement-bypass-when-using-username-as-alias/76092
• https://github.com/openbao/openbao/commit/c52795c1ef746c7f2c510f9225aa8ccbbd44f9fc
• https://github.com/openbao/openbao/security/advisories/GHSA-2q8q-8fgw-9p6p

Get alerted when CVE-2025-55001 or the next vulnerability affects your stack