CVE-2026-72636
Uncontrolled Recursion (CWE-674) in the Elasticsearch wildcard matching helper can lead to a denial of service via Excessive Allocation (CAPEC-130).
Does this matter?
Lower severity and a low EPSS score (0.30%). Track it; it rarely justifies an emergency change on its own.
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.
- CVSS 3.1
- 6.5 MEDIUMCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
- EPSS
- 0.30% probability · 23th percentile
- CISA KEV
- Not listed
- Weakness
- CWE-674
- Affected
- elastic/elasticsearch
- Source
- security@elastic.co
References
Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA. Refreshed daily.