CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-39396 — OpenBao is an open source identity-based secrets management system

Medium CVSS 6.5

OpenBao is an open source identity-based secrets management system. Prior to version 2.5.3, `ExtractPluginFromImage()` in OpenBao's OCI plugin downloader extracts a plugin binary from a container image by streaming decompressed tar data via `io.Copy` with no upper bound on the number of bytes written. An attacker who controls or compromises the OCI registry referenced in the victim's configuration can serve a crafted image containing a decompression bomb that decompresses to an arbitrarily large file. The SHA256 integrity check occurs after the full file is written to disk, meaning the hash mismatch is detected only after the damage (disk exhaustion) has already occurred. This allow the attacker to replace **legit plugin image** with no need to change its signature. Version 2.5.3 contains a patch.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.1)
Published
2026-04-21
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400, CWE-674, CWE-770

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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