CVE-2026-63263 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption in Elasticsearch Leading to Denial of Service
An authenticated user can cause denial of service in Elasticsearch by submitting crafted ES|QL queries that exhaust CPU resources.
- 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-2026-63263?
CVE-2026-63263 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Elastic Elasticsearch, published on 21 Jul 2026. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (CWE-400) in Elasticsearch can lead to denial of service via Exponential Data Expansion (CAPEC-197). An authenticated user may submit a specially crafted query to the ES|QL engine that causes exponential CPU consumption during query evaluation. Because the resource exhaustion persists beyond query completion, repeated requests can fully exhaust the available query worker resources, rendering ES|QL queries unavailable until the node is restarted.
Weakness: CWE-400
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-63263?
1 open source package ship an affected version, including elasticsearch. It affects 1 product.
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
elasticsearch Bitnami | From 8.0.0 | 8.19.19, 9.3.8, 9.4.4 |
Products include Elastic Elasticsearch.
How do I fix CVE-2026-63263?
Upgrade elasticsearch to a fixed version for your release line: 8.19.19, 9.3.8 or 9.4.4.
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-2026-63263 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-63263 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-2026-63263, CLEANSTART-2026-DE60819, CLEANSTART-2026-JM55948, GHSA-727x-48vv-8cj7, MINI-354h-wpxx-g878, MINI-4h8r-mff9-frqp and 20 more.