Uncontrolled Recursion in Elasticsearch Wildcard Matching Leading to Denial of Service

MITRE NVD CVE.ORG JSON API

Summary

CVECVE-2026-72636
StatePUBLISHED
Assignerelastic
Source PriorityCVE Program / NVD first with legacy fallback
Published2026-08-13 20:17:24 UTC
Updated2026-08-13 21:18:09 UTC
DescriptionUncontrolled Recursion (CWE-674) in the Elasticsearch wildcard matching helper can lead to a denial of service via Excessive Allocation (CAPEC-130). The matcher used to resolve wildcard patterns against names is implemented recursively and had no bound on recursion depth or on the total number of match operations performed. A search request containing a wildcard pattern with a large number of wildcard groups, evaluated against a sufficiently long name, exhausts the thread stack. Elasticsearch treats a stack overflow as an unrecoverable condition and shuts the node down, so the request terminates the affected node rather than failing gracefully.

Risk And Classification

Primary CVSS: v3.1 6.5 MEDIUM from [email protected]

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

EPSS: 0.002940000 probability, percentile 0.219630000 (date 2026-08-16)

Problem Types: CWE-674 | CWE-674 CWE-674 Uncontrolled Recursion

VersionSourceTypeScoreSeverityVector
3.1[email protected]Secondary6.5MEDIUMCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
3.1CNACVSS6.5MEDIUMCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

CVSS v3.1 Breakdown

Attack Vector
Network
Attack Complexity
Low
Privileges Required
Low
User Interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Vendor Declared Affected Products

SourceVendorProductVersionPlatforms
CNA Elastic Elasticsearch affected 8.0.0 8.19.19 semver Not specified
CNA Elastic Elasticsearch affected 9.0.0 9.4.4 semver Not specified

References

ReferenceSourceLinkTags
discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-8-19-20-9-4-5-security-update-esa-2026-133/38... [email protected] discuss.elastic.co
CVE Program record CVE.ORG www.cve.org canonical
NVD vulnerability detail NVD nvd.nist.gov canonical, analysis

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