When Trust Cracks: The Vault Fault That Shook Identity Security
Opening Scene: The Unthinkable Inside Your Digital Fortress
Imagine standing before a vault that holds every secret of your organisation. It is solid, silent and built to withstand brute force. Yet, one day you discover someone walked straight in. No alarms. No credentials. No trace of a break-in. That is what the security community woke up to when researchers disclosed Vault Fault. A cluster of flaws in the very tools meant to guard our digital crown jewels.
Behind the Curtain: The Guardians of Our Secrets
Secrets management platforms like HashiCorp Vault and CyberArk Conjur or Secrets Manager sit at the heart of modern identity infrastructure. They store API keys, service credentials, encryption keys and more. In DevSecOps pipelines and hybrid environments, they are the trusted custodians. If a vault is compromised, it is not one system at risk. It is every connected system.
Vault Fault Unveiled: A Perfect Storm of Logic Flaws
Security firm Cyata revealed fourteen vulnerabilities spread across CyberArk and HashiCorp’s vault products. These were not just minor configuration oversights. They included:
- CyberArk Conjur: IAM authenticator bypass by manipulating how regions are parsed. Privilege escalation by authenticating as a policy. Remote code execution by exploiting the ERB-based Policy Factory.
- HashiCorp Vault: Nine zero-day issues including the first ever RCE in Vault. Bypasses of multi-factor authentication and account lockout logic. User enumeration through subtle timing differences. Escalation by abusing how policies are normalised.
These were chains of logic flaws that could be combined to devastating effect. Attackers could impersonate identities, escalate privileges, execute arbitrary code and exfiltrate secrets without ever providing valid credentials.
The Fallout: When Silent Vaults Explode
Perhaps the most unnerving fact is the age of some vulnerabilities. Several had been present for up to nine years. Quiet, undetected and exploitable. Remote code execution against a secrets vault is the equivalent of giving an intruder the keys to every door in your company. Once inside, they can lock you out, leak sensitive information or weaponise access for extortion.
Response and Remedy: Patch, Shield, Reinvent
Both vendors have issued fixes:
- CyberArk Secrets Manager and Self-Hosted versions 13.5.1 and 13.6.1.
- CyberArk Conjur Open Source version 1.22.1.
- HashiCorp Vault Community and Enterprise editions 1.20.2, 1.19.8, 1.18.13 and 1.16.24.
Cyata’s guidance is direct. Patch immediately. Restrict network exposure of vault instances. Audit and rotate secrets. Minimise secret lifetime and scope. Enable detailed audit logs and monitor for anomalies. CyberArk has also engaged directly with customers to support remediation efforts.
Broader Lessons: Beyond the Fault
The nature of these flaws should make us pause. They were not memory corruption or injection bugs. They were logic vulnerabilities hiding in plain sight. The kind that slip past automated scans and live through version after version.
It is like delegating your IaaS or PaaS to AWS or Azure. They may run the infrastructure, but you are still responsible for meeting your own uptime SLAs. In the same way, even if you store secrets such as credit card numbers, API tokens or encryption keys in a vault, you remain responsible for securing them. The liability for a breach still sits with you.
Startups are especially vulnerable. Many operate under relentless deadlines and tight budgets. They offload everything that is not seen as part of their “core” operations to third parties. This speeds up delivery but also widens the blast radius when those dependencies are compromised. When your vault provider fails, your customers will still hold you accountable.
This should push us to adopt more defensive architectures. Moving towards ephemeral credentials, context-aware access and reducing reliance on long-lived static secrets.
We also need a culture shift. Secrets vaults are not infallible. Their security must be tested continuously. This includes adversarial simulations, code audits and community scrutiny. Trust in security systems is not a one-time grant. It is a relationship that must be earned repeatedly.
Closing Reflection: Trust Must Earn Itself Again
Vault Fault is a reminder that even our most trusted systems can develop cracks. The breach is not in the brute force of an attacker but in the quiet oversight of logic and design. As defenders, we must assume nothing is beyond failure. We must watch the watchers, test the guards and challenge the fortresses we build. Because the next fault may already be there, waiting to be found.
References and Further Reading
- The Hacker News – CyberArk and HashiCorp Flaws Enable Secret Exfiltration Without Credentials: https://thehackernews.com/2025/08/cyberark-and-hashicorp-flaws-enable.html
- CSO Online – Researchers uncover RCE attack chains in popular enterprise credential vaults: https://www.csoonline.com/article/4035274/researchers-uncover-rce-attack-chains-in-popular-enterprise-credential-vaults.html
- Dark Reading – Critical Zero-Day Bugs in CyberArk, HashiCorp Password Vaults: https://www.darkreading.com/cybersecurity-operations/critical-zero-day-bugs-cyberark-hashicorp-password-vaults
- Cyata Security – Vault Fault Disclosure: https://cyata.ai/vault-fault
- CyberArk Official Blog – Addressing Recent Vulnerabilities and Our Commitment to Security: https://www.cyberark.com/resources/all-blog-posts/addressing-recent-vulnerabilities-and-our-commitment-to-security
