What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-63263: Uncontrolled Resource Consumption in Elasticsearch Leading to Denial of Service
- Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2026-07-22 · updated 2026-10-24
- Weakness: CWE-400
Description
Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (CWE-400) in Elasticsearch can lead to denial of service via Exponential Data Expansion (CAPEC-197). An authenticated user may submit a specially crafted query to the ES|QL engine that causes exponential CPU consumption during query evaluation. Because the resource exhaustion persists beyond query completion, repeated requests can fully exhaust the available query worker resources, rendering ES|QL queries unavailable until the node is restarted.
Affected products
- Elasticsearch: from 8.0.0 before 8.19.19; from 9.0.0 before 9.3.8; from 9.4.0 before 9.4.4 — fixed in 8.19.19, 9.3.8, 9.4.4
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: Elasticsearch 8.19.19, 9.3.8, 9.4.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
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