Vault unauthenticated denial of service through complex json payload
A malicious user may submit a specially-crafted complex payload that otherwise meets the default request size limit which results in excessive memory and CPU consumption of Vault. This may lead to a timeout in Vault’s auditing subroutine, potentially resulting in the Vault server to become unresponsive. This vulnerability, CVE-2025-6203, is fixed in Vault Community Edition 1.20.3 and Vault Enterprise 1.20.3, 1.19.9, 1.18.14, and 1.16.25.
02 / AFFECTED SOFTWARE
Affected packages
03 / CONNECTIONS
Connected vulnerabilities
04 / EVIDENCE
Source records
HashiCorp Vault Community Edition Denial of Service Though Complex JSON Payloads in github.com/hashicorp/vault
A malicious user may submit a specially-crafted complex payload that otherwise meets the default request size limit which results in excessive memory and CPU consumption of Vault. This may lead to a timeout in Vault’s auditing subroutine, potentially resulting in the Vault server to become unresponsive. This vulnerability, CVE-2025-6203, is fixed in Vault Community Edition 1.20.3 and Vault Enterprise 1.20.3, 1.19.9, 1.18.14, and 1.16.25.
A malicious user may submit a specially-crafted complex payload that otherwise meets the default request size limit which results in excessive memory and CPU consumption of Vault. This may lead to a timeout in Vault’s auditing subroutine, potentially resulting in the Vault server to become unresponsive. This vulnerability, CVE-2025-6203, is fixed in Vault Community Edition 1.20.3 and Vault Enterprise 1.20.3, 1.19.9, 1.18.14, and 1.16.25.
A malicious user may submit a specially-crafted complex payload that otherwise meets the default request size limit which results in excessive memory and CPU consumption of Vault. This may lead to a timeout in Vault’s auditing subroutine, potentially resulting in the Vault server to become unresponsive. This vulnerability, CVE-2025-6203, is fixed in Vault Community Edition 1.20.3 and Vault Enterprise 1.20.3, 1.19.9, 1.18.14, and 1.16.25.
05 / REFERENCES
Further evidence
- https://discuss.hashicorp.com
- https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/hcsec-2025-24-vault-denial-of-service-though-complex-json-payloads/76393
- https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-8f82-53h8-2p34
- https://github.com/hashicorp/vault/commit/eedc2b7426f30e57e306229ce697ce81e203ab89
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-6203
- https://github.com/hashicorp/vault
- https://github.com/CVEProject/cvelistV5/tree/main/cves/2025/6xxx/CVE-2025-6203.json