What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2017-8438

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.8 v3.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 1.0% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2017-06-05 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-284

Description

Elastic X-Pack Security versions 5.0.0 to 5.4.0 contain a privilege escalation bug in the run_as functionality. This bug prevents transitioning into the specified user specified in a run_as request. If a role has been created using a template that contains the _user properties, the behavior of run_as will be incorrect. Additionally if the run_as user specified does not exist, the transition will not happen.

Affected products

• Elastic X-Pack Security: 5.0.0, 5.0.1, 5.0.2, 5.1.0, 5.1.1, 5.2.0 (+7)

References

• https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elastic-stack-5-4-1-and-5-3-3-security-updates/87952
• https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-5-4-1-and-5-3-3-released
• https://www.elastic.co/community/security
• https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elastic-stack-5-4-1-and-5-3-3-security-updates/87952
• https://www.elastic.co/blog/elasticsearch-5-4-1-and-5-3-3-released
• https://www.elastic.co/community/security

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