Medium · published August 14, 2026
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.
| Product | Versions | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| elastic/elasticsearch | ≥ 8.0.0, < 8.19.20 | 8.19.20 |
| elastic/elasticsearch | ≥ 9.0.0, < 9.4.5 | 9.4.5 |
| elastic/elasticsearch | ≥ 9.5.0, < 9.5.1 | 9.5.1 |