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 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.
When the product encounters an error condition or failure, its design requires it to fall back to a state that is less secure than other options that are available, such as selecting the weakest encryption algorithm or using the most permissive access control restrictions.