Описание
OpenBao: Transit secrets engine crashes on key creation with derived: true for asymmetric key types
On OpenBao 2.5.4 and 2.5.2(and likely earlier versions also), an authenticated caller with write access to transit/keys/* can crash the OpenBao server by issuing a single key-creation request that combines an asymmetric type (rsa-*, ecdsa-*, ed25519)
with derived: true. The server returns no HTTP response and the process terminates (exit code 2). This is a remote, low-complexity denial-of-service against the OpenBao server.
Mount the transit engine:
Trigger the crash:
You can try with both JSON or HCL It will crash the entire cluster.
Observed: HTTP 000 curl: (52) Empty reply from server
Root Cause (Hypothesis)
Key-derivation paths in the transit engine appear to assume a symmetric key shape (a derivable key context). When derived: true is supplied alongside an asymmetric type, the creation path likely panics on a missing derived-key field or
invalid type assertion rather than returning a structured validation error. Maintainers should confirm against the transit policy.go / key-creation path.
Suggested fix:
Validate the (type, derived) combination at the top of the create-key handler. Reject with a 400 if derived: true is set on any non-symmetric type (i.e. anything other than aes128-gcm96, aes256-gcm96, chacha20-poly1305,
xchacha20-poly1305). Do this before any code path that may panic on missing derived-key state.
Пакеты
github.com/openbao/openbao
>= 0.1.0, <= 2.5.4
Отсутствует
github.com/openbao/openbao
< 0.0.0-20260617104123-db57c62602b2
0.0.0-20260617104123-db57c62602b2
