Resource exhaustion in Hashicorp Vault

CVE-2025-12044

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.

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 7.5 (High). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.005 (42.6th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 43rd percentile — 42.6% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2025-12044: held from 0.005 to 0.005.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.005 · newest: 0.005 · change: +0.000

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2025-12044?
CVE-2025-12044 is a high-severity vulnerability in Hashicorp Vault, classified under Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling. CVSS score: 7.5/10. Published 2025-10-23.
How severe is CVE-2025-12044?
High severity. CVSS v3 base score is 7.5 out of 10.