CVE-2025-68384 Elasticsearch Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
A low-privileged user can cause a persistent denial of service by submitting oversized settings data, crashing the Elasticsearch server.
- 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-2025-68384?
CVE-2025-68384 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Elastic Elasticsearch, published on 18 Dec 2025. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling (CWE-770) in Elasticsearch can allow a low-privileged authenticated user to cause Excessive Allocation (CAPEC-130) causing a persistent denial of service (OOM crash) via submission of oversized user settings data.
Weakness: CWE-770
Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-68384?
7 open source packages ship an affected version, including org.elasticsearch.plugin:x-pack-security and elasticsearch. It affects 1 product.
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
org.elasticsearch.plugin:x-pack-security Maven | All versions | 8.19.9 |
org.elasticsearch.plugin:x-pack-security Maven | All versions | 8.19.9 |
org.elasticsearch.plugin:x-pack-security Maven | From 9.0.0 | 9.1.9 |
org.elasticsearch.plugin:x-pack-security Maven | From 9.0.0 | 9.1.9 |
org.elasticsearch.plugin:x-pack-security Maven | From 9.2.0 | 9.2.3 |
org.elasticsearch.plugin:x-pack-security Maven | From 9.2.0 | 9.2.3 |
1 more packages
elasticsearch Bitnami | All versions | 8.19.9, 9.1.9, 9.2.3 |
Products include Elastic Elasticsearch.
How do I fix CVE-2025-68384?
Upgrade org.elasticsearch.plugin:x-pack-security to a fixed version for your release line: 8.19.9, 9.1.9 or 9.2.3.
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-2025-68384 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-68384 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-2025-68384, CLEANSTART-2026-GF44673, CLEANSTART-2026-ND94120, GHSA-qf7c-7r9h-mm92, MINI-286g-jp22-c5j7, MINI-384j-2vc8-rcfj and 16 more.