Uncontrolled Resource Consumption in Elasticsearch Leading to denial of service

Affected versions

NVD version ranges (for catalog products). Add the product to your stack with a version and matching uses these.

• elastic elasticsearch9.2.0 and later · before 9.4.7
• elastic elasticsearch9.5.0 and later · before 9.5.4

Versions reported by the vendor

Affected version ranges reported by the assigning authority (elastic). Independent of NVD's CPE analysis and usually ahead of it.

• Elastic Elasticsearch

  • 9.2.0 and later · up to and including 9.4.6affected · semver
  • 9.5.0 and later · up to and including 9.5.3affected · semver

Other highest-scoring records for the same primary product.

• CVE-2015-1427The Groovy scripting engine in Elasticsearch before 1.3.8 and 1.4.x before 1.4.3 allows remote attackers to bypass the sandbox protection meKEV
  99Now
• CVE-2014-3120The default configuration in Elasticsearch before 1.2 enables dynamic scripting, which allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary MVEL expKEV
  89Now
• CVE-2023-31419Elasticsearch StackOverflow vulnerability
  49Plan
• CVE-2021-22145A memory disclosure vulnerability was identified in Elasticsearch 7.10.0 to 7.13.3 error reporting.
  49Plan
• CVE-2015-5377Elasticsearch before 1.6.1 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via unspecified vectors involving the transport protocol.
  43Plan
• CVE-2021-22146All versions of Elastic Cloud Enterprise has the Elasticsearch “anonymous” user enabled by default in deployed clusters.
  41Plan

FIRST EPSS daily score; only changes of 0.01 or more are recorded (step chart).

Root cause

Code that parses nested structures sets no depth or size limit. A small input can turn into a disproportionate processing load.

A representative example of this vulnerability class. Not the vendor's source code; it shows the faulty pattern and its fix.

1function expand(node) {2  return node.children.map(expand);3}

1const MAX_DEPTH = 32;2function expand(node, depth = 0) {3  if (depth > MAX_DEPTH) throw new Error("too deep");4  return node.children.map((c) => expand(c, depth + 1));5}

Attack context

MITRE CAPEC attack patterns and ATT&CK techniques for this weakness class (CWE). A starting point for detection rules and threat hunting.