Threats Tagged 'cve-2026-72678'

CVE-2026-72678 is a medium severity vulnerability in Elasticsearch where an authenticated user with read privileges can cause the node to allocate an excessively large amount of memory by submitting a crafted request. This leads to memory exhaustion and a fatal error that terminates the Elasticsearch node process, resulting in denial of service and degraded cluster health. The issue is exploitable with a single request regardless of heap size configuration. A patch is available for affected versions.

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.