CVE-2018-3831 Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor in Elasticsearch

What is CVE-2018-3831?

CVE-2018-3831 is a high-severity vulnerability in Elastic Elasticsearch, published on 19 Sep 2018. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Elasticsearch Alerting and Monitoring in versions before 6.4.1 or 5.6.12 have an information disclosure issue when secrets are configured via the API. The Elasticsearch _cluster/settings API, when queried, could leak sensitive configuration information such as passwords, tokens, or usernames. This could allow an authenticated Elasticsearch user to improperly view these details.

Weakness: CWE-200

Which versions are affected by CVE-2018-3831?

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

Products include Elastic Elasticsearch.

How do I fix CVE-2018-3831?

Upgrade org.elasticsearch:elasticsearch to a fixed version for your release line: 5.6.12 or 6.4.1.

Is CVE-2018-3831 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2018-3831 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-r9fv-qpm9-rj4g.