CVE-2026-72636
Uncontrolled Recursion in Elasticsearch Wildcard Matching Leading to Denial of Service
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.
| CWE | CWE-674 |
| Vendor | elastic |
| Product | elasticsearch |
| Ecosystems | |
| Industries | Technology |
| Published | Aug 13, 2026 |
| Last Updated | Aug 13, 2026 |
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CVSS v3 Breakdown
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H