CVE-2018-17244 Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor in Elasticsearch

What is CVE-2018-17244?

CVE-2018-17244 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Elastic Elasticsearch, published on 20 Dec 2018. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Elasticsearch Security versions 6.4.0 to 6.4.2 contain an error in the way request headers are applied to requests when using the Active Directory, LDAP, Native, or File realms. A request may receive headers intended for another request if the same username is being authenticated concurrently; when used with run as, this can result in the request running as the incorrect user. This could allow a user to access information that they should not have access to.

Weakness: CWE-200, CWE-362

Which versions are affected by CVE-2018-17244?

2 open source packages ship an affected version, including org.elasticsearch:elasticsearch. It affects 1 product.

Products include Elastic Elasticsearch.

How do I fix CVE-2018-17244?

Upgrade org.elasticsearch:elasticsearch to 6.4.3 or later.

Is CVE-2018-17244 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2018-17244 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Elastic Elasticsearch

• CVE-2015-1427 Elasticsearch Groovy Scripting Engine Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2014-3120 Elasticsearch Remote Code Execution Exploited High 8.1
• CVE-2015-5377 Code injection in n/a Critical 9.8
• CVE-2026-72649 Deserialization of Untrusted Data in Elasticsearch Leading to Remote Code Execution High 8.8
• CVE-2026-72642 Use of Out-of-range Pointer Offset in the Elasticsearch Machine Learning Native Inference Process High 8.8

All Elastic Elasticsearch vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as GHSA-vpqm-88c4-x4cv.