6.5

CVE-2026-72636: elastic elasticsearch Uncontrolled Recursion

CVSS: 6.5v3.1MediumAnalyzed
AliasesCGA-26rg-fc8j-9wx4CGA-76w2-v66v-xx77CGA-h9fq-j8hg-vmpg
Published 13-08-2026Last modified 13-08-2026
Open JSON

Vulnerability summary

CVE-2026-72636 is a medium (CVSS 6.5) Uncontrolled Recursion vulnerability in elastic elasticsearch. EPSS estimates a 0.42% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 34.9% of scored vulnerabilities.

Overall risk
26/100
0100
Medium · default modelHow is this calculated?
CVSS score
6.5/10
010
Medium · v3.1 (CVE.org)
EPSS score
0.42%
0%100%
Low · +0.12 pp in 30 days
KEVNot listedIn no KEV catalog
RansomwareNone recordedNo known use recorded
Public exploits0No public exploits recorded

Timeline

  1. 13-08-2026
    PublishedVulnerability first disclosed.
  2. 13-08-2026
    Last modifiedVulnerability information updated.

Description

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.

CVSS metrics

3 scores · 3 sources · 1 version

EPSS trend

Probability

0.42%

Chance of exploitation in the next 30 days

Percentile

35%

Versus all other CVEs

30-day change

+0.12 pp

From 0.30% on 21-09-2026

21-09-202621-10-2026
EPSS score
0.42%

Known exploited

Compare KEV catalogs

Not in any of the 3 tracked catalogs.

Public exploits

0 found

No public exploits indexed.

Weaknesses

CWE · root cause

Affected systems

Chainguard2 products
  • elasticsearch-9.2All versions (No fix recorded)
  • elasticsearch-9.3All versions (No fix recorded)
Elastic1 product
  • elasticsearch≥ 8.0.0, ≤ 8.19.19 | ≥ 9.0.0, ≤ 9.4.4 | ≥ 8.0.0, < 8.19.20 | ≥ 9.0.0, < 9.4.5

2 vendors · 3 products

References

3 links