CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2025-59043 — OpenBao is an open source identity-based secrets management system

High CVSS 7.5

OpenBao is an open source identity-based secrets management system. In OpenBao versions prior to 2.4.1, JSON objects after decoding may use significantly more memory than their serialized version. It is possible to craft a JSON payload to maximize the factor between serialized memory usage and deserialized memory usage, similar to a zip bomb, with factors reaching approximately 35. This can be used to circumvent the max_request_size configuration parameter which is intended to protect against denial of service attacks. The request body is parsed into a map very early in the request handling chain before authentication, which means an unauthenticated attacker can send a specifically crafted JSON object and cause an out-of-memory crash. Additionally, for requests with large numbers of strings, the audit subsystem can consume large quantities of CPU. The vulnerability is fixed in version 2.4.1.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2025-10-17
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

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

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.