CVE-2026-72636

Summary

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.

Affected Software

Weaknesses

• CWE-674: CWE-674 Uncontrolled Recursion

ADP Enrichment

CISA ADP Vulnrichment

• SSVC:
• Exploitation: none
  • Automatable: no
  • Technical Impact: partial

References

• https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-8-19-20-9-4-5-security-update-esa-2026-133/389499

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