OpenBao vulnerable to denial of service via malicious JSON request processing (CVE-2025-59043)
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.
OpenBao vulnerable to denial of service via malicious JSON request processing (CVE-2025-59043)
Description
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.
Affected software
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Technical Details
- Gcve Source
- db.gcve.eu
- Osv Id
- BIT-openbao-2025-59043
- Osv Schema Version
- 1.6.2
- Aliases
- ["CVE-2025-59043"]
- Ecosystems
- ["Bitnami"]
- Database Specific Severity
- High
- Cvss Version
- null
Patch Information
Threat ID: 6aa005f6acd9273b49ab63b9
Added to database: 09/08/2026, 12:56:22 UTC
Last updated: 09/08/2026, 12:56:22 UTC
Views: 1
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