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Fencer Intel
medium 4.4

CVE-2021-38553 json

HashiCorp Vault underlying database had excessively broad filesystem permissions from v1.4.0 until v1.8.0

published 5y ago modified 2mo ago also BIT-vault-2021-38553 , EUVD-2021-1503 , GHSA-23fq-q7hc-993r , GO-2022-0620

cvss
4.4
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.3%
EPSS 0.3% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 19%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

HashiCorp Vault and Vault Enterprise 1.4.0 through 1.7.3 initialized an underlying database file associated with the Integrated Storage feature with excessively broad filesystem permissions. Fixed in Vault and Vault Enterprise 1.8.0.

Patch / fix

  • go github.com/hashicorp/vault 1.8.0
  • bitnami vault 1.8.0
  • hashicorp vault 1.8.0
  • vault Arch Linux 1.9.0-1

arch linux advisories AVG-2294

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Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2021-38553 updated cvss 4.4

vault: Underlying database file with excessively broad filesystem permissions

  • Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4 openshift4/ose-installer, openshift4/topology-aware-lifecycle-manager-rhel8-operator
    affected: no fix available “Fix deferred”
  • Red Hat Openshift Container Storage 4 ocs4/cephcsi-rhel8, ocs4/mcg-rhel8-operator, ocs4/ocs-rhel8-operator, ocs4/rook-ceph-rhel8-operator
    affected: no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat Logging Subsystem for Red Hat OpenShift openshift-logging/logging-loki-rhel8 Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh 2.0 servicemesh, servicemesh-mixc, servicemesh-mixs, servicemesh-istioctl, servicemesh-pilot-agent, servicemesh-pilot-discovery Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes 2 vault Red Hat Openshift Data Foundation 4 odf4/cephcsi-rhel9, odf4/mcg-rhel9-operator, odf4/ocs-rhel9-operator, odf4/odf-rhel8-operator, odf4/odr-rhel8-operator, odf4/rook-ceph-rhel8-operator, +1 more
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

0.27% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 19% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
GitHub 3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 3.1 4.4 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
NVD 2.0 2.1 AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:P
OSV 3.1 4.4 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
go github.com/hashicorp/vault
>=1.4.0, <1.8.0
1.8.0
bitnami vault
>=1.4.0, <1.8.0
1.8.0

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-281 Improper Preservation of Permissions

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.