Bulletin ID: HCSEC-2026-27
Affected Products / Versions: Vault Enterprise 2.0.0, 1.21.5, 1.20.10, and 1.19.16 LTS, up to 2.0.3, 1.21.8, 1.20.13, and 1.19.19 LTS; fixed in Vault Enterprise 2.0.4, 1.21.9, 1.20.14 and 1.19.20.
Publication Date: August 10, 2026
Summary
Vault Enterprise’s identity entity batch-delete endpoint is vulnerable to a cross-namespace authorization bypass that may allow an authenticated caller in one namespace to permanently delete the storage backing of entities belonging to another namespace. This vulnerability (CVE-2026-14886) is fixed in Vault Enterprise 2.0.4, 1.21.9, 1.20.14 and 1.19.20.
Background
Vault’s identity system manages entities, which represent a user or process across multiple authentication methods. In Vault Enterprise, namespaces provide isolated administrative and access boundaries, and entities are scoped to the namespace in which they were created. The identity/entity/batch-delete endpoint allows an authenticated caller to delete a list of entities.
Details
The batch-delete handler checked the namespace of each requested entity to determine whether it should be removed from Vault’s in-memory identity database, but it did not apply that same namespace check before removing the entity’s underlying storage. Because entity storage is shared across namespaces and organized only by entity ID, a caller could submit the ID of an entity belonging to a different namespace and cause its storage to be deleted, even though the entity remained visible in memory until the next restart or reload. Once the identity store reloaded from storage, the affected entity was permanently lost. The issue requires an authenticated caller with access to the batch-delete endpoint in some namespace; it does not require access to the namespace that owns the target entity. Vault Community Edition is not affected because it does not include namespaces.
Remediation
Customers should evaluate the risk associated with this issue and consider upgrading to Vault Enterprise 2.0.4, 1.21.9, 1.20.14 or 1.19.20.
Acknowledgement
This issue was reported to HashiCorp by Harish Kolla.
We deeply appreciate any effort to coordinate disclosure of security vulnerabilities. For information about security at HashiCorp and the reporting of security vulnerabilities, please see https://hashicorp.com/security.