Vault 1.15.0 release notes

GA date: 2023-09-27

Release notes provide an at-a-glance summary of key updates to new versions of Vault. For a comprehensive list of product updates, improvements, and bug fixes refer to the changelog included with the Vault code on GitHub.

We encourage you to upgrade to the latest release of Vault to take advantage of continuing improvements, critical fixes, and new features.

Known issues and breaking changes

Vault companion updates

Companion updates are Vault updates that live outside the main Vault binary.

Core updates

Follow the learn more links for more information, or browse the list of Vault tutorials updated to highlight changes for the most recent GA release.

Enterprise updates

Internal error when vault policy in namespace does not exist

If a user is a member of a group that gets a policy from a namespace other than the one they’re trying to log into, and that policy doesn’t exist, Vault returns an internal error. This impacts all auth methods.

Affected versions

• 1.13.8 and 1.13.9
• 1.14.4 and 1.14.5
• 1.15.0 and 1.15.1

A fix will be released in Vault 1.15.2, 1.14.6, and 1.13.10.

Workaround

During authentication, Vault derives inherited policies based on the groups an entity belongs to. Vault returns an internal error when attaching the derived policy to a token when:

1. the token belongs to a different namespace than the one handling authentication, and
2. the derived policy does not exist under the namespace.

You can resolve the error by adding the policy to the relevant namespace or deleting the group policy mapping that uses the derived policy.

As an example, consider the following userpass auth method failure. The error is due to the fact that Vault expects a group policy under the namespace that does not exist.

# Failed login
$ vault login -method=userpass username=user1 password=123
Error authenticating: Error making API request.

URL: PUT http://127.0.0.1:8200/v1/auth/userpass/login/user1
Code: 500. Errors:

* internal error

To confirm the problem is a missing policy, start by identifying the relevant entity and group IDs:

$ vault read -format=json identity/entity/name/user1 | \
  jq '{"entity_id": .data.id, "group_ids": .data.group_ids} '
{
  "entity_id": "420c82de-57c3-df2e-2ef6-0690073b1636",
  "group_ids": [
    "6cb152b7-955d-272b-4dcf-a2ed668ca1ea"
  ]
}

Use the group ID to fetch the relevant policies for the group under the ns1 namespace:

$ vault read -format=json -namespace=ns1 \
  identity/group/id/6cb152b7-955d-272b-4dcf-a2ed668ca1ea | \
  jq '.data.policies'
[
  "group_policy"
]

Now that we know Vault is looking for a policy called group_policy, we can check whether that policy exists under the ns1 namespace:

$ vault policy list -namespace=ns1
default

The only policy in the ns1 namespace is default, which confirms that the missing policy (group_policy) is causing the error.

To fix the problem, we can either remove the missing policy from the 6cb152b7-955d-272b-4dcf-a2ed668ca1ea group or create the missing policy under the ns1 namespace.

$ vault write                                             \
  -namespace=ns1                                          \
  identity/group/id/6cb152b7-955d-272b-4dcf-a2ed668ca1ea  \
  name="test"                                             \
  policies="default"

$ vault policy write -namespace=ns1 group_policy - << EOF
    path "secret/data/*" {
        capabilities = ["create", "update"]
    }
EOF

Verify the fix by re-running the login command:

$ vault login -method=userpass username=user1 password=123

Vault is storing references to ephemeral sub-loggers leading to a memory leak

Vault is unexpectedly storing references to ephemeral sub-loggers which prevents them from being cleaned up, leading to a memory leak. This impacts many areas of Vault, but primarily logins in Enterprise. There is no workaround.

Affected versions

This issue affects Vault Community and Enterprise versions:

• 1.13.7+
• 1.14.3+
• 1.15.0+

A fix will be issued in the next release

Feature deprecations and EOL

Please refer to the Deprecation Plans and Notice page for up-to-date information on feature deprecations and plans or the Feature Deprecation FAQ for general questions about our deprecation process.