What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-71543: OpenBao's Templated Policies Allow Privilege Escalation via Wildcard Characters

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v4.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-09-21 · updated 2026-09-25
• Weakness: CWE-863

Description

OpenBao is an open source identity-based secrets management system. Prior to 2.6.0, templated ACL, PKI, and SSH policies could substitute attacker-controlled identity data without rejecting syntax-significant characters. In ACL templated policies, asterisks, plus signs, and slashes could alter path matching. In PKI allowed_uri_sans_template and allowed_domains policies, an asterisk could broaden certificate issuance to unauthorized domains. In SSH allowed_users and allowed_domains policies, a comma could add unauthorized principals. Exploitation requires a deployment to use templated policy data that users can freely modify; templates based on the randomly generated identity.entity.id value are not affected. This could allow privilege escalation, unauthorized access, and unauthorized certificate issuance. This issue is fixed in version 2.6.0.

Affected products

• openbao: before 2.6.0

References

• https://github.com/hashicorp/vault/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md#201
• https://github.com/openbao/openbao/commit/2d4ebafec5c524408b3d4ac1198df909cb7ac8c1
• https://github.com/openbao/openbao/commit/e516ce508e1481504cadbfbf62052364339093bc
• https://github.com/openbao/openbao/pull/3401
• https://github.com/openbao/openbao/pull/3473
• https://github.com/openbao/openbao/releases/tag/v2.6.0
• https://github.com/openbao/openbao/security/advisories/GHSA-59w7-v8rr-pr4p

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