What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-72683: Uncontrolled Recursion in Elasticsearch Leading to Denial of Service
- Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 0.6% 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-674
Description
A flaw in Elasticsearch allows an authenticated user with the privileges required to invoke the simulate pipeline API endpoint (https://www.elastic.co/docs/api/doc/elasticsearch/operation/operation-ingest-simulate) to submit a request that causes a self-referential data structure to be created. When a specific internal component later processes that structure, the operation recurses without bound and raises a fatal error that is not handled by the surrounding execution path, terminating the affected node process and resulting in a denial of service.
Affected products
- Elasticsearch: from 5.0.0 before 8.19.19; from 9.3.0 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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