# CVE-2021-22139: Denial of service in Kibana

> An attacker with webhook creation permissions can exhaust connection pools, causing a denial of service for all Kibana users.

- **Severity:** Medium 6.5 (`CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H`)
- **Exploited in the wild:** Not known
- **Login needed:** Any signed-in user
- **Attackable:** Over the internet
- **Victim action needed:** Not needed
- **Fix available:** No
- **Published:** 13 May 2021
- **Updated:** 3 Aug 2024
- **Also known as:** GHSA-823g-p8g4-q559

## What is CVE-2021-22139?

CVE-2021-22139 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Elastic Kibana, published on 13 May 2021. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.

### Official description

Kibana versions before 7.12.1 contain a denial of service vulnerability was found in the webhook actions due to a lack of timeout or a limit on the request size. An attacker with permissions to create webhook actions could drain the Kibana host connection pool, making Kibana unavailable for all other users.

Weakness: CWE-400 (Uncontrolled Resource Consumption)

## Which versions are affected by CVE-2021-22139?

It affects 1 product.


Products: Elastic Kibana.

## How do I fix CVE-2021-22139?

No fix has been published for CVE-2021-22139 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.

## Is CVE-2021-22139 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-22139 in the wild and no public exploit code.

## Other vulnerabilities in Elastic Kibana

- [CVE-2019-7609](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2019-7609/): Kibana Arbitrary Code Execution (critical 9.8, exploited in the wild)
- [CVE-2025-25015](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2025-25015/): Kibana arbitrary code execution via prototype pollution (critical 9.9)
- [CVE-2024-37288](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2024-37288/): Deserialization in Kibana (critical 9.9)
- [CVE-2023-31415](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2023-31415/): Code injection in Kibana (critical 9.9)
- [CVE-2018-17245](https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2018-17245/): Information disclosure in Kibana (critical 9.8)

## Fix prompt for AI coding agents

```text
Check this codebase for CVE-2021-22139 and fix it if it is affected.

What it is: CVE-2021-22139 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Elastic Kibana, published on 13 May 2021. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.
Exploitation: There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-22139 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Affected product: Elastic Kibana. No package-level version data is available, so check the vendor advisory linked from the reference page.

Task:
1. Search the dependency manifests and lockfiles (for example package.json, package-lock.json, requirements.txt, poetry.lock, uv.lock, pom.xml, build.gradle, go.mod, Cargo.lock, Gemfile.lock) and any Dockerfiles for the affected packages, including transitive dependencies.
2. If an affected version is in use, upgrade it to the fixed version for its release line with the project's package manager, so the lockfile is regenerated. Prefer the smallest upgrade that fixes it.
3. If there is no fix, or the upgrade would break the build, do not guess: explain the risk and the safest workaround instead.
4. Run the tests and summarise what changed and why.
5. If nothing in the project is affected, say so and change nothing.

Reference: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2021-22139/ (Markdown: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2021-22139/index.md)
```

## Sources

- CVE record: https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2021-22139
- NVD: https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-22139
- OSV: https://osv.dev/vulnerability/CVE-2021-22139

---
From sbomify Insights: https://insights.sbomify.com/CVE-2021-22139/
Summaries are generated and may contain mistakes; the official description above is the record.