Vault Vulnerable to Cache-Timing Attacks During Seal and Unseal Operations

HashiCorp Vault's implementation of Shamir's secret sharing used precomputed table lookups, and was vulnerable to cache-timing attacks. An attacker with access to, and the ability to observe a large number of unseal operations on the host through a side channel may reduce the search space of a brute force effort to recover the Shamir shares. Fixed in Vault 1.13.1, 1.12.5, and 1.11.9.

Two separate operations in a product require different amounts of time to complete, in a way that is observable to an actor and reveals security-relevant information about the state of the product, such as whether a particular operation was successful or not.

An attacker operating through local access may attempt exploitation with elevated privileges. If successful, the issue may cause the confidentiality, integrity or availability impact described by the vendor.