CVE-2025-68388 Elasticsearch Packetbeat has Excessive Allocation of Memory and CPU via Malicious IPv4 Fragments

What is CVE-2025-68388?

CVE-2025-68388 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Elastic Packetbeat, published on 18 Dec 2025. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Allocation of resources without limits or throttling (CWE-770) allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to cause excessive allocation (CAPEC-130) of memory and CPU via the integration of malicious IPv4 fragments, leading to a degradation in Packetbeat.

Weakness: CWE-770

Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-68388?

10 open source packages ship an affected version, including github.com/elastic/beats and github.com/elastic/beats/v7. It affects 1 product.

Products include Elasticsearch Packetbeat.

How do I fix CVE-2025-68388?

Upgrade github.com/elastic/beats 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-2025-68388 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-68388 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Elastic Packetbeat

• CVE-2017-11480 Denial of Service in Packetbeat High 7.5
• CVE-2025-68381 Packetbeat Improper Bounds Check Medium 6.5
• CVE-2025-68382 Packetbeat Out-of-bounds Read Medium 6.5
• CVE-2026-26933 Improper Validation of Array Index in Packetbeat Leading to Denial of Service Medium 5.7
• CVE-2026-26932 Improper Validation of Array Index in Packetbeat Leading to Denial of Service Medium 5.7

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as GHSA-fj69-23m4-ccvv, GO-2025-4253, MINI-2m59-vc7h-rh6j, MINI-2v92-h8r4-8h6q, MINI-484h-qg26-ghq9, MINI-59m9-h8qw-hx47 and 6 more.