What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2026-72684: Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in Elasticsearch Leading to Denial of Service
- Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 0.4% 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-770
Description
A flaw in Elasticsearch allows an authenticated user holding only read privileges to submit a small search request containing a crafted user-supplied input. Processing that input causes a specific internal component to allocate memory without any upper bound, and the allocation occurs outside the scope of the existing memory accounting controls that were intended to constrain it. The resulting out-of-memory condition is fatal and terminates the affected node process, causing a denial of service.
Affected products
- Elasticsearch: from 8.0.0 before 8.19.20; from 9.0.0 before 9.4.5 — fixed in 8.19.20, 9.4.5
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: Elasticsearch 8.19.20, 9.4.5. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
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