Medium [CVE-2026-72678] Denial of Service via excessive memory allocation
This medium-severity Red Hat Linux advisory covers CVE-2026-72678.
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Summary
A flaw was found in Elasticsearch. An authenticated user with read privileges can submit a crafted request that causes the node to attempt an excessively large memory allocation due to unvalidated user input.
This memory exhaustion leads to a fatal error, terminating the Elasticsearch node process and causing a Denial of Service (DoS) for the affected node. A single request is sufficient to trigger this issue.
An unvalidated allocation flaw exists in Elasticsearch's API request processing mechanisms. When handling user-supplied size parameters during data structure initialization, Elasticsearch fails to bound memory allocation requests.
This results in service disruption and degraded cluster health, posing a high impact to availability. Red Hat severity: Moderate — CVSS 6.5 (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H).
Weakness: CWE-770. Under investigation: Red Hat OpenShift AI (RHOAI); Red Hat Quay 3.
Affected versions
No affected-version range was extracted from the source record. The vendor advisory is authoritative — check it before change work.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 1 hour ago·verify at source
Fixed versions
No fixed release is recorded yet. That does not prove no patch exists — confirm against the vendor advisory.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 1 hour ago·verify at source
Mitigation checklist
- Restrict API access permissions using Elasticsearch role-based access control (RBAC) so that only trusted users can access read endpoints. Additionally, configure request circuit breakers (`indices.breaker.request.limit`) to enforce strict memory allocation caps per request execution.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 1 hour ago·verify at source
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