CVE-2026-72639: medium-severity vulnerability in Elasticsearch
Memory Allocation with Excessive Size Value in Elasticsearch Highlighting Leading to Denial of Service
Published
E-mail alert when it lands in KEV, gets a public PoC or its score goes up.
13Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 6.5epss 0.4%
Elasticsearch does not enforce an upper bound on a user-supplied count accepted by a search highlighting option, and the allocation derived from that count is not accounted against any circuit breaker. An authenticated user holding only read privileges on a single searchable index can submit one small search request that causes the node to reserve an excessively large internal data structure. The allocation occurs before the existing highlighting safety limits are evaluated, so memory exhaustion raises a fatal error that terminates the Elasticsearch node process. This results in a denial of service for the affected node and degrades cluster routing and health. The defect is not volumetric and does not depend on the size of the indexed data, so a single request is sufficient.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Affected products
Elastic · ElasticsearchRelated CVEs — Elasticsearch
In the same product, most dangerous first.