Auth bypass in Hashicorp Vault

CVE-2026-5006

A vulnerability was identified in HashiCorp Vault and Vault Enterprise (“Vault”) such that an authenticated attacker may manipulate an identity value referenced by a templated policy path to gain unintended access to Vault paths. An attacker who can control the referenced identity value may include slash ({{/}}) characters that Vault interprets as additional path segments when rendering the policy. This vulnerability, CVE-2026-5006, was fixed in Vault Community Edition 2.0.4 and Vault Enterprise 2.0.4, 1.21.9, 1.20.14, and 1.19.20.

Vulnerability class: IDOR (Insecure Direct Object Reference)

Published · last modified .

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 6.8 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.003 (18.7th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 19th percentile — 18.7% 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-2026-5006: held from 0.002 to 0.003.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.002 · newest: 0.003 · change: +0.001

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

Public proof-of-concept exploits

References

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2026-5006?
CVE-2026-5006 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Hashicorp Vault, classified under Authorization Bypass Through User-Controlled Key. CVSS score: 6.8/10. Published 2026-08-24.
How severe is CVE-2026-5006?
Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 6.8 out of 10.
Is CVE-2026-5006 known to be exploited?
1 public proof-of-concept repositories are indexed. Not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.