CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2021-45042 — Hashicorp Vault security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 6.8

In HashiCorp Vault and Vault Enterprise before 1.7.7, 1.8.x before 1.8.6, and 1.9.x before 1.9.1, clusters using the Integrated Storage backend allowed an authenticated user (with write permissions to a kv secrets engine) to cause a panic and denial of service of the storage backend. The earliest affected version is 1.4.0.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.8 (2.0)
Published
2021-12-17
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application

Affected products

  • hashicorp / vault
  • hashicorp / vault / 1.9.0

Showing 2 representative product identities from 6 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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