Vulnerability · Published Aug 13, 2026 · Assigned by elastic
CVE-2026-72683Uncontrolled Recursion in Elasticsearch 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 0.6% (higher than 47% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official 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 (as reported)
| Vendor | Product | Versions |
|---|---|---|
| Elastic | Elasticsearch | 5.0.0 – through 8.19.189.3.0 – through 9.3.79.4.0 – through 9.4.3 |
Weakness: CWE-674 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H