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
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.
A flaw was found in Elasticsearch. 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.
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 23 days 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 23 days 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 23 days ago·verify at source
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