CVE-2024-52981 Elasticsearch Vulnerable to Stack Overflow due to a Large Recursion
Attackers can cause a stack overflow and denial of service in Elasticsearch by sending specially crafted nested GeometryCollection objects.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- An administrator
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2024-52981?
CVE-2024-52981 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Elastic Elasticsearch, published on 8 Apr 2025. An attacker needs administrator access to exploit it, with no action from the victim.
Official description
An issue was discovered in Elasticsearch, where a large recursion using the Well-KnownText formatted string with nested GeometryCollection objects could cause a stackoverflow.
Weakness: CWE-400
Which versions are affected by CVE-2024-52981?
5 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 7.17.0 | 7.17.24 |
org.elasticsearch:elasticsearch Maven | From 7.17.0 | 7.17.24 |
org.elasticsearch:elasticsearch Maven | From 8.0.0-alpha1 | 8.15.1 |
org.elasticsearch:elasticsearch Maven | From 8.0.0-alpha1 | 8.15.1 |
elasticsearch Bitnami | From 7.17.0 | 7.17.24, 8.15.1 |
Products include Elastic Elasticsearch.
How do I fix CVE-2024-52981?
Upgrade org.elasticsearch:elasticsearch to a fixed version for your release line: 7.17.24 or 8.15.1.
Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.
Is CVE-2024-52981 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2024-52981 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-2024-52981, GHSA-5xm9-x7x4-4j5x, MINI-3rhg-9q7g-jcmr, MINI-9hfh-3xv6-64rf, UBUNTU-CVE-2024-52981.