CVE-2025-4166
Description
A flaw was found in the Hashicorp Vault component. Vault Community and Vault Enterprise Key/Value (kv) Version 2 plugin may unintentionally expose sensitive information in server and audit logs when users submit malformed payloads during secret creation or update operations via the Vault REST API. When creating or updating secrets using the KV v2 plugin through the REST API, Vault inadvertently logged the value of the secret when an error occurred in the server logs and audit logs. The inadvertent logging only affected operations if a payload was sent incorrectly, such as improperly formatted JSON. Normal operations through the UI or CLI are unaffected.
Mitigation
Customers with the capability to search through server and audit logs for any possible exposed secrets can refer to the following snippets to aid in searching. More information on viewing audit and server logs can be found at: https://developer.hashicorp.com/vault/tutorials/monitoring/troubleshooting-vault#vault-logs
Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Score Details
Info alert:Important note
CVSS scores for open source components depend on vendor-specific factors (e.g. version or build chain). Therefore, Red Hat's score and impact rating can be different from NVD and other vendors. Red Hat remains the authoritative CVE Naming Authority (CNA) source for its products and services (see Red Hat classifications).
The following CVSS metrics and score provided are preliminary and subject to review.
CVSS v3 Score Breakdown
| Red Hat | NVD | cve.org | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base Score | 4.5 | 6.5 | N/A |
| Attack Vector | Network | Network | N/A |
| Attack Complexity | Low | Low | N/A |
| Privileges Required | High | None | N/A |
| User Interaction | Required | Required | N/A |
| Scope | Unchanged | Unchanged | N/A |
| Confidentiality | High | High | N/A |
| Integrity Impact | None | None | N/A |
| Availability Impact | None | None | N/A |
Vector
Red Hat: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
NVD: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
Understanding the Weakness (CWE)
Confidentiality
Technical Impact: Read Application Data
Often this will either reveal sensitive information which may be used to launch another, more focused attack or disclose private information stored in the server. For example, an attempt to exploit a path traversal weakness (CWE-22) might yield the full pathname of the installed application. In turn, this could be used to select the proper number of ".." sequences to navigate to the targeted file. An attack using SQL injection (CWE-89) might not initially succeed, but an error message could reveal the malformed query, which would expose query logic and possibly even passwords or other sensitive information used within the query.
Frequently Asked Questions
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