CVE-2025-12044: Hashicorp Vault

High severity, CVSS 7.5. EPSS: 0.5% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

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.

Affected products

• Hashicorp Vault: from 1.16.25, before 1.16.27 (fixed in 1.16.27); from 1.18.14, up to and including 1.18.15; from 1.19.9, up to and including 1.19.11; from 1.20.3, before 1.20.5 (fixed in 1.20.5); from 1.20.3, before 1.21.0 (fixed in 1.21.0)

Published 2025-10-23. Last modified 2026-06-17.