CVE-2025-12044

Description

Vault and Vault Enterprise (“Vault”) are vulnerable to an unauthenticated denial of service when processing JSON payloads. This occurs due to a regression from a previous fix for [+HCSEC-2025-24+|https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/hcsec-2025-24-vault-denial-of-service-though-complex-json-payloads/76393]  which allowed for processing JSON payloads before applying rate limits. This vulnerability, CVE-2025-12044, is fixed in Vault Community Edition 1.21.0 and Vault Enterprise 1.16.27, 1.19.11, 1.20.5, and 1.21.0.

How to fix CVE-2025-12044

To remediate CVE-2025-12044, upgrade the affected package to a fixed version below.

• —upgrade to 1.16.27 or later
• —upgrade to 1.21.0 or later
• —upgrade to 1.21.0 or later

Is CVE-2025-12044 being exploited?

Low — EPSS is 0.3%, meaning exploitation activity has not been observed at scale.

Affected packages (3)

• >= 0.6.0, < 1.16.27, >= 1.17.0, < 1.19.11, >= 1.20.0, < 1.21.0
• >= 1.20.3, < 1.21.0
• >= 1.20.3, < 1.21.0

CVSS scores

References (6)

• ADVISORYgithub.com/advisories/GHSA-vp5w-xcfc-73wf
• ADVISORYnvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-12044
• PATCHgithub.com/hashicorp/vault
• WEBdiscuss.hashicorp.com/t/hcsec-2025-31-vault-vulnerable-to-denial-of-service-due-to-rate-limit-regression/76710