OpenBao's Kerberos Auth Method Accumulates Unaccessible TokensGHSA-7j6w-vvw2-5f9c
MEDIUMFix: openbao/openbao#3150GHSA-7j6w-vvw2-5f9c is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.3) CWE-770 vulnerability in github.com/openbao/openbao. A fix is available for github.com/openbao/openbao — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- 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 GHSA-7j6w-vvw2-5f9c.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
GHSA-7j6w-vvw2-5f9c by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 384,993 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Real-World Exposure
github.com/openbao/openbaoReal-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
Impact
In OpenBao's Kerberos auth method on the GET handler, or when an Authorization: Negotiate header is supplied, the response is includes a logical.Auth object in addition to an error message. This results in tokens being created with only the default policy, default TTL, and no entity information, which are hidden by the returned error message. No access to these tokens by the caller occurs and the authentication token is not ever made accessible outside of sys/raw. At most this could cause storage usage.
Patches
This is fixed in OpenBao v2.5.4.
Workarounds
Users may set a rate limit quota to limit the creation of these paths. As the path is unauthenticated, it isn't possible to deny access to it.
Reporter
This was discovered by an anonymous reporter.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐹Go | github.com/openbao/openbao | all versions | 2.5.4go get github.com/openbao/openbao@v2.5.4 |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for github.com/openbao/openbao, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update github.com/openbao/openbao to 2.5.4 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-7j6w-vvw2-5f9c is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service.
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.
Red Hat products do not ship the OpenBao server. Some products bundle the OpenBao API client library (github.com/openbao/openbao/api/v2) as a Go dependency, but this client module does not contain the vulnerable server-side Kerberos authentication handler where token accumulation occurs. The community packages…
Update OpenBao to version 2.5.4 or later, which limits Kerberos authentication token accumulation.Source: Red Hat security advisory for GHSA-7j6w-vvw2-5f9c (CC BY 4.0)
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-7j6w-vvw2-5f9c in your dependencies?
Find it across Go, including transitive dependencies.