CVE-2025-37731 Elasticsearch Improper Authentication

What is CVE-2025-37731?

CVE-2025-37731 is a medium-severity authentication bypass vulnerability in Elastic Elasticsearch, published on 15 Dec 2025. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Improper Authentication in Elasticsearch PKI realm can lead to user impersonation via specially crafted client certificates. A malicious actor would need to have such a crafted client certificate signed by a legitimate, trusted Certificate Authority.

Weakness: CWE-287

Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-37731?

13 open source packages ship an affected version, including org.elasticsearch.plugin:x-pack-core, elasticsearch and org.elasticsearch.plugin:x-pack-security. It affects 1 product.

Products include Elastic Elasticsearch.

How do I fix CVE-2025-37731?

Upgrade org.elasticsearch.plugin:x-pack-core to a fixed version for your release line: 8.19.8, 9.1.8 or 9.2.2.

Upgrade, and rotate credentials and sessions that may have been exposed. More about Authentication bypass.

Is CVE-2025-37731 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-37731 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-2025-37731, CLEANSTART-2026-GO07314, ECHO-8f00-c6a2-b9cc, GHSA-m9gh-789g-q5pv, MINI-2frc-j8p6-w4cj, MINI-5xwq-6phg-4xvq and 17 more.