Description
Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (CWE-400) in Elasticsearch can lead to denial of service via Exponential Data Expansion (CAPEC-197). An authenticated user may submit a specially crafted query to the ES|QL engine that causes exponential CPU consumption during query evaluation. Because the resource exhaustion persists beyond query completion, repeated requests can fully exhaust the available query worker resources, rendering ES|QL queries unavailable until the node is restarted.
Affected products
elastic: elasticsearch
References1
- discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-8-19-19-9-3-8-9-4-4-security… Vendor Advisory
Metrics
- CVSS 3.1
-
6.5
MEDIUM
Score source: CNA
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H - EPSS — exploit probability
- 0% percentile: 41 · as of 14 November 2026
- CWE
- CWE-400
Could this be exploited in your environment?
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