CVE-2026-72687

medium

Assigned by CNA: elastic

Published 2026-08-13 · Modified 2026-08-13

Discuss on Community Propose mitigation

CVSS v3

6.5

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

6.5

Description

A flaw in Elasticsearch allows a low-privileged authenticated user to submit a single small request containing a forged opaque identifier. Elasticsearch decodes and deserializes the identifier before confirming that it was legitimately issued by the cluster, and a size value carried inside the identifier drives an allocation that is neither capped nor accounted for by the available memory-usage controls. The resulting out-of-memory condition is fatal and terminates the affected node process, resulting in a denial of service.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

75%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

Propose a mitigation on Community Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

References

https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-8-19-20-9-4-5-9-5-1-security-update-esa-2026-79/389506

CWEs

CWE-789

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.