What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-72642: Use of Out-of-range Pointer Offset in the Elasticsearch Machine Learning Native Inference Process
- Severity: high (CVSS 8.8 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2026-08-13 · updated 2026-09-01
- Weakness: CWE-823
Description
The native inference process that Elasticsearch uses to evaluate uploaded machine learning models accepts a model operation that computes a memory address from an offset supplied inside the model, without validating that the offset stays within the bounds of the underlying storage. A user with the privileges required to upload and deploy a trained model can craft a model that reads and writes memory outside the intended allocation. The result is heap corruption that crashes the inference process, and, with sufficient control over the heap layout, could allow arbitrary code execution in the context of that process.
Affected products
- Elasticsearch: from 8.19.0 before 8.19.20; from 9.4.0 before 9.4.5; from 9.5.0 before 9.5.1 — fixed in 8.19.20, 9.4.5, 9.5.1
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: Elasticsearch 8.19.20, 9.4.5, 9.5.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
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