Allocation of Resources Without Limits in Elasticsearch

Executive Summary

CVE-2026-56149 is a vulnerability in Elasticsearch where a user with elevated privileges can submit a specially crafted machine learning request that causes excessive memory consumption. This happens because the system allocates resources without limits or throttling, leading to a denial of service condition by making the affected node unavailable.

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Impact Analysis

This vulnerability can impact you by causing a denial of service on your Elasticsearch node. An attacker with the necessary privileges can exploit this flaw to consume excessive memory, which may render the node unavailable and disrupt services relying on it.

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Detection Guidance

There are no specific indicators of compromise or detection commands identified for this vulnerability. The issue involves excessive memory consumption caused by specially crafted machine learning requests submitted by users with elevated privileges.

Since the vulnerability requires an account with privileges to create or manage trained models, monitoring and auditing such privileged accounts' activities may help detect potential exploitation attempts.

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Mitigation Strategies

The primary mitigation step is to upgrade Elasticsearch to a fixed version: 8.19.17, 9.3.6, or 9.4.3 or later.

There are no available workarounds for users unable to upgrade.

Additionally, restricting or monitoring accounts with privileges to create or manage trained models can reduce the risk of exploitation.

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