A REALISTIC CODE EXECUTION EXPLOIT CHAIN IN OPENBAO AND VAULT

Summary from the TLDR InfoSec newsletter

ControlPlane chained four OpenBao flaws into an unauthenticated-to-RCE exploit that forges a SPIFFE provisioner certificate via an ACME URI SAN bypass, hijacks an admin role through case-insensitive ACL paths, and crosses namespaces to restore a malicious Raft snapshot. The final step executes any pre-existing binary whose SHA-256 the attacker can guess, even on read-only images and auto-unseal nodes, and Vault Community Edition remains unpatched after IBM declined a mutual disclosure agreement. Upgrade to OpenBao v2.6.3 or v2.7.0, or, as a stopgap, remove plugin_directory and enforce ACME EAB via BAO_DISABLE_PUBLIC_ACME.