SOC status:Duty analyst on shift

UK Cyber Defence
VulnerabilityAnalyzed

CVE-2026-72678

The resulting memory exhaustion raises a fatal error that terminates the Elasticsearch node process, causing a denial of service for the affected node and degrading cluster health.

MEDIUM 6.5EPSS 0.33%

Does this matter?

Lower severity and a low EPSS score (0.33%). Track it; it rarely justifies an emergency change on its own.

Description

Elasticsearch does not validate a size value taken from a user-supplied input before that value is used to reserve memory for an internal data structure. An authenticated user holding only read privileges can submit a single small crafted request to a product API endpoint that causes the node to attempt an excessively large allocation. The resulting memory exhaustion raises a fatal error that terminates the Elasticsearch node process, causing a denial of service for the affected node and degrading cluster health. The defect is not volumetric, so a single request is sufficient regardless of the heap size configured on the target node.

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
0.33% probability · 26th percentile
CISA KEV
Not listed
Weakness
CWE-789
Affected
elastic/elasticsearch
Source
security@elastic.co

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA. Refreshed daily.