CVE-2024-8185
Published: 31 October 2024
Summary
CVE-2024-8185 is a high-severity Failing Open (CWE-636) vulnerability in Hashicorp Vault. Its CVSS base score is 7.5 (High).
Operationally, ranked in the top 28.8% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2024-3041
Vulnerability details
Vault Community and Vault Enterprise (“Vault”) clusters using Vault’s Integrated Storage backend are vulnerable to a denial-of-service (DoS) attack through memory exhaustion through a Raft cluster join API endpoint . An attacker may send a large volume of requests to…
more
the endpoint which may cause Vault to consume excessive system memory resources, potentially leading to a crash of the underlying system and the Vault process itself. This vulnerability, CVE-2024-8185, is fixed in Vault Community 1.18.1 and Vault Enterprise 1.18.1, 1.17.8, and 1.16.12.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Likely Mitigating Controls AI
Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.
Ensures audit logging continues on primary failure instead of failing open with no logging capability.
Supports failing securely by requiring alerts and configurable actions (e.g., shutdown) when the audit mechanism fails instead of continuing without it.
Entering safe mode when conditions are detected prevents failing open and continuing normal operation in a potentially exploitable state.
Ensures security functions remain enforced via alternatives instead of defaulting to an insecure state when the primary means fails.
Fail-safe-defaults principle prevents systems from failing open.
Directly requires transition to a known (secure) state on failure, preventing fail-open behavior.
Standby components and explicit exchange criteria enforce a controlled, secure failover instead of failing open.
Directly implements fail-safe (fail-closed/secure) behavior on indicated failures, preventing the system from defaulting to an insecure open state.