GHSA-g233-2p4r-3q7v is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) CWE-636 vulnerability in github.com/hashicorp/vault. A fix is available for github.com/hashicorp/vault — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Hashicorp Vault vulnerable to denial of service through memory exhaustion
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-g233-2p4r-3q7v.
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
GHSA-g233-2p4r-3q7v 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 377,166 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/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
Vault Community and Vault Enterprise (“Vault”) clusters using Vault’s Integrated Storage backend are vulnerable to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack through memory exhaustion through a Raft cluster join API endpoint. An attacker may send a large volume of requests to the endpoint which may cause Vault to consume excessive system memory resources, potentially leading to a crash of the underlying system and the Vault process itself.
This vulnerability, CVE-2024-8185, is fixed in Vault Community 1.18.1 and Vault Enterprise 1.18.1, 1.17.8, and 1.16.12.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐹Go | github.com/hashicorp/vault | ≥ 1.2.0&&< 1.18.1 | 1.18.1go get github.com/hashicorp/vault@v1.18.1 |
| 🐹Go | github.com/openbao/openbao | all versions | 2.0.3go get github.com/openbao/openbao@v2.0.3 |
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 1.18.1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-g233-2p4r-3q7v 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 GHSA-g233-2p4r-3q7v can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-g233-2p4r-3q7v. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-g233-2p4r-3q7v in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-g233-2p4r-3q7v across Go dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.