CVE-2021-22137 Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor in Elasticsearch

What is CVE-2021-22137?

CVE-2021-22137 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Elastic Elasticsearch, published on 13 May 2021. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

In Elasticsearch versions before 7.11.2 and 6.8.15 a document disclosure flaw was found when Document or Field Level Security is used. Search queries do not properly preserve security permissions when executing certain cross-cluster search queries. This could result in the search disclosing the existence of documents the attacker should not be able to view. This could result in an attacker gaining additional insight into potentially sensitive indices.

Weakness: CWE-281, CWE-200

Which versions are affected by CVE-2021-22137?

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

Products include Elastic Elasticsearch.

How do I fix CVE-2021-22137?

Upgrade org.elasticsearch:elasticsearch to a fixed version for your release line: 6.8.15 or 7.11.2.

Is CVE-2021-22137 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-22137 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 BIT-elasticsearch-2021-22137, GHSA-hr65-qq6p-87r4, UBUNTU-CVE-2021-22137.