HashiCorp Vault's implementation of Shamir's secret sharing vulnerable to cache-timing attacksGHSA-vq4h-9ghm-qmrr
MEDIUMFix: hashicorp/vault#19495GHSA-vq4h-9ghm-qmrr is a medium-severity (CVSS 4.7) 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.
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 GHSA-vq4h-9ghm-qmrr.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
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 |
Affected Products
vaulthashicorpDetection & 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 GHSA-vq4h-9ghm-qmrr 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.
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 GHSA-vq4h-9ghm-qmrr in your dependencies?
Find it across Go, including transitive dependencies.