CVE-2021-22140

Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2021-05-13 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-611

Description

Elastic App Search versions after 7.11.0 and before 7.12.0 contain an XML External Entity Injection issue (XXE) in the App Search web crawler beta feature. Using this vector, an attacker whose website is being crawled by App Search could craft a malicious sitemap.xml to traverse the filesystem of the host running the instance and obtain sensitive files.

Affected products

Elastic App Search: from 7.11.0 before 7.12.0 — fixed in 7.12.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Elastic App Search 7.12.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

https://discuss.elastic.co/t/7-12-1-security-update/271433
https://discuss.elastic.co/t/7-12-1-security-update/271433

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