CVE-2023-25000 is a medium-severity (CVSS 5) CWE-208 vulnerability in github.com/hashicorp/vault. A fix is available for github.com/hashicorp/vault — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Vault Vulnerable to Cache-Timing Attacks During Seal and Unseal Operations
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2023-25000.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2023-25000 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 378,156 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
Real-World Exposure
github.com/hashicorp/vault🐹github.com/hashicorp/vault🐹github.com/hashicorp/vaultReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects Go packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
HashiCorp Vault's implementation of Shamir's secret sharing used precomputed table lookups, and was vulnerable to cache-timing attacks. An attacker with access to, and the ability to observe a large number of unseal operations on the host through a side channel may reduce the search space of a brute force effort to recover the Shamir shares. Fixed in Vault 1.13.1, 1.12.5, and 1.11.9.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐹Go | github.com/hashicorp/vault | all versions | 1.11.9go get github.com/hashicorp/vault@v1.11.9 |
| 🐹Go | github.com/hashicorp/vault | ≥ 1.12.0&&< 1.12.5 | 1.12.5go get github.com/hashicorp/vault@v1.12.5 |
| 🐹Go | github.com/hashicorp/vault | ≥ 1.13.0&&< 1.13.1 | 1.13.1go get github.com/hashicorp/vault@v1.13.1 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for github.com/hashicorp/vault, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update github.com/hashicorp/vault to 1.11.9 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2023-25000 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2023-25000 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2023-25000. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.13 | openshift4/ose-installer:v4.13.0-202305091542.p0.g44db7b2.assembly.stream | RHSA-2023:1326 |
| Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.14 | openshift4/ose-installer:v4.14.0-202310201027.p0.g03546e5.assembly.stream | RHSA-2023:5006 |
| RHODF-4.13-RHEL-9 | odf4/odf-rhel9-operator:v4.13.0-24 | RHSA-2023:3742 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2023-25000 in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds CVE-2023-25000 across Go dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.