Vulnerability · Published Aug 13, 2026 · Assigned by elastic

CVE-2026-72686Uncontrolled 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).

Severity (CVSS 3.1)6.5Medium
Exploit odds (30 days)0.6%top 52.9% of all CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: none
Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

A flaw in Elasticsearch allows a low-privileged authenticated user to submit a single request containing a crafted user-supplied input. A specific internal component validates the input using a recursive routine and applies no bound to the length of the value being validated, so the validation causes the thread to exhaust its stack. The resulting fatal error is not handled by the surrounding execution paths and terminates the affected node process, producing a denial of service.

Affected products (as reported)

VendorProductVersions
Elastic Elasticsearch 8.0.0 – through 8.19.199.0.0 – through 9.4.49.5.0

Weakness: CWE-674 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

References