cipherboy

Vault has had PKI since pre-v1; ACME was introduced in 2022 to modernize its APIs.

I'll bite ;-) Appreciate your replies as always tptacek!

It is a fair criticism. But I think two things give us an advantage here:

1. IBM started this fork and later bought HashiCorp, with the acquisition having fully completed. I've broached the subject with both sides post-acquisition but got only a negative response from the HashiCorp side and no response from IBM. We are very much a known entity to the teams that matter inside IBM. And I'd posit within HashiCorp as well given I came out of their Vault Crypto team. ;-)

Whether IBM wishes to cooperate is a different matter. Mentioning again, publicly, doesn't hurt and hopefully raises awareness to researchers (such as yourself!).

2. The Linux Foundation's OpenSSF (our umbrella foundation) has a reputation which we try our best to uphold. Obviously they'd be rightfully upset if we shared pre-disclosure vulnerabilities widely. So we won't and don't. Certainly the broader Linux distribution security list is a positive model in this regard.

If this were J. Doe's pet fork of $CRITICAL_SOFTWARE, 100% agree. But the fork is neither new nor lacking in reputation of its component/parent entities, so I'd hope researchers give us the same consideration they would any other of LF's forks (Valkey, OpenSearch, OpenTofu, ...).

But that said, I've personally disclosed vulnerabilities post-fork to HashiCorp and have mentioned to them that I have stopped future disclosures without a further agreement. This just leads to a two-party zero-day vulnerability race, which is not in anyone's best interest.

OpenBao, under the Linux Foundation's OpenSSF, is making meaningful improvements to the code. I'd love to have high-quality reports, if you're willing to re-visit these. :-)

On behalf of the OpenBao project, I welcome collaboration with future researchers. We were not informed of these vulnerabilities before HashiCorp posted their usual CVE bulletins, which is disappointing. (Especially as HashiCorp's Vault no longer has an Open Source edition ;-)

We've triaged as being affected by 8 of the 9 CVEs (in fixing an earlier Cert Auth vulnerability, we correctly remediated this one) and have merged patches for most of them.

Happily, the community has done some great work on remediating these and I'm very appreciative of them.

I'm most excited about the audit changes: this was the impetus needed to make them be configuration driven in the next release series. Leaving audit device (which, as a reminder, have a socket mode which can make arbitrary TCP calls!) open to API callers is rather unsafe, even with prefix being limited.

(Edit: And of course it goes without saying, but we're more than happy to accept contributions to the community -- code, docs, technical, or otherwise!)