CVE-2022-23708 Elasticsearch privilege escalation
Authenticated users with wildcard index permissions can access the security index due to disabled protections during version upgrades.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Any signed-in user
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2022-23708?
CVE-2022-23708 is a medium-severity missing authorization vulnerability in Elastic Elasticsearch, published on 3 Mar 2022. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
A flaw was discovered in Elasticsearch 7.17.0’s upgrade assistant, in which upgrading from version 6.x to 7.x would disable the in-built protections on the security index, allowing authenticated users with “*” index permissions access to this index.
Weakness: CWE-264
Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-23708?
3 open source packages ship an affected version, including org.elasticsearch:elasticsearch and elasticsearch. It affects 1 product.
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
org.elasticsearch:elasticsearch Maven | From 7.16.0 | 7.17.1 |
org.elasticsearch:elasticsearch Maven | From 7.16.0 | 7.17.1 |
elasticsearch Bitnami | From 7.16.0 | 7.17.1 |
Products include Elastic Elasticsearch.
How do I fix CVE-2022-23708?
Upgrade org.elasticsearch:elasticsearch to 7.17.1 or later.
Upgrade, and check permissions on every request on the server, not only in the interface. More about Missing authorization.
Is CVE-2022-23708 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-23708 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Elastic Elasticsearch
- CVE-2015-1427 Elasticsearch Groovy Scripting Engine Remote Code Execution
- CVE-2014-3120 Elasticsearch Remote Code Execution
- CVE-2015-5377 Code injection in n/a
- CVE-2026-72649 Deserialization of Untrusted Data in Elasticsearch Leading to Remote Code Execution
- CVE-2026-72642 Use of Out-of-range Pointer Offset in the Elasticsearch Machine Learning Native Inference Process
Sources
Also known as BIT-elasticsearch-2022-23708, GHSA-pgq6-ccqj-hpqr, UBUNTU-CVE-2022-23708.