OpenBao Root Namespace Operator May Elevate Token Privileges

Impact

Accounts with access to the highly-privileged identity entity system in the root namespace may increase their scope directly to the root policy. While the identity system always allowed adding arbitrary policies, which in turn could contain capability grants on arbitrary paths, the root policy is restricted to manual generation using unseal or recovery key shares. The global root policy is not accessible from child namespaces.

Patches

OpenBao v2.3.2 will patch this issue.

Workarounds

Use of denied_parameters in any policy which has access to the affected identity endpoints (on identity entities) may be sufficient to prohibit this type of attack.

References

This issue was disclosed to HashiCorp and is the OpenBao equivalent of the following tickets:

• https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/hcsec-2025-13-vault-root-namespace-operator-may-elevate-token-privileges/76032
• https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/cve-2025-5999