CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-52894 — OpenBao exists to provide a software solution to manage, store, and distribute sensitive data including secrets, certificates, and keys

High CVSS 7.5

OpenBao exists to provide a software solution to manage, store, and distribute sensitive data including secrets, certificates, and keys. OpenBao before v2.3.0 allowed an attacker to perform unauthenticated, unaudited cancellation of root rekey and recovery rekey operations, effecting a denial of service. In OpenBao v2.2.0 and later, manually setting the configuration option `disable_unauthed_rekey_endpoints=true` allows an operator to deny these rarely-used endpoints on global listeners. A patch is available at commit fe75468822a22a88318c6079425357a02ae5b77b. In a future OpenBao release communicated on OpenBao's website, the maintainers will set this to `true` for all users and provide an authenticated alternative. As a workaround, if an active proxy or load balancer sits in front of OpenBao, an operator can deny requests to these endpoints from unauthorized IP ranges.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2025-06-25
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • openbao / openbao

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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