CVE-2026-72636 — Uncontrolled Recursion in Elasticsearch Wildcard Matching Leading to Denial of Service
Uncontrolled Recursion (CWE-674) in the Elasticsearch wildcard matching helper can lead to a denial of service via Excessive Allocation (CAPEC-130). The matcher used to resolve …
Published: 2026-08-13 · CVSS: 6.5 · CVSS 3.1
Uncontrolled Recursion (CWE-674) in the Elasticsearch wildcard matching helper can lead to a denial of service via Excessive Allocation (CAPEC-130). The matcher used to resolve wildcard patterns against names is implemented recursively and had no bound on recursion depth or on the total number of match operations performed. A search request containing a wildcard pattern with a large number of wildcard groups, evaluated against a sufficiently long name, exhausts the thread stack. Elasticsearch treats a stack overflow as an unrecoverable condition and shuts the node down, so the request terminates the affected node rather than failing gracefully.
Source: CVE Program · Revision 8b16575c39f1e1810c5e863010da073d2d3285e7