Vulnerability · Published Aug 13, 2026 · Assigned by elastic
CVE-2026-72636Uncontrolled Recursion in Elasticsearch Wildcard Matching Leading to Denial of Service
Medium 6.5
In plain English
A medium-severity security flaw in Elasticsearch from Elastic. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.4% (higher than 36% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official description
Uncontrolled 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.
Affected products (as reported)
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| Elastic | Elasticsearch | 8.0.0 – through 8.19.199.0.0 – through 9.4.4 |
Weakness: CWE-674 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H