Elasticsearch allocation of resources without limits or throttling leads to crash

An allocation of resources without limits or throttling in Elasticsearch can lead to an OutOfMemoryError exception resulting in a crash via a specially crafted query using an SQL function.

Elasticsearch Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability

A flaw was discovered in Elasticsearch, where processing a document in a deeply nested pipeline on an ingest node could cause the Elasticsearch node to crash.

Elasticsearch StackOverflow vulnerability

A flaw was discovered in Elasticsearch, affecting the _search API that allowed a specially crafted query string to cause a Stack Overflow and ultimately a Denial of Service.

Elasticsearch Insertion of sensitive information in audit logs

Elasticsearch generally filters out sensitive information and credentials before logging to the audit log. It was found that this filtering was not applied when requests to Elasticsearch use certain deprecated URIs for APIs. The impact of this flaw is that sensitive information such as passwords and tokens might be printed in cleartext in Elasticsearch audit logs. Note that audit logging is disabled by default and needs to be explicitly enabled and even when audit logging is enabled, request bodies that could contain sensitive information are not printed to the audit log unless explicitly configured.

Elasticsearch uncontrolled resource consumption

An issue has been identified with how Elasticsearch handled incoming requests on the HTTP layer. An unauthenticated user could force an Elasticsearch node to exit with an OutOfMemory error by sending a moderate number of malformed HTTP requests. The issue was identified by Elastic Engineering and we have no indication that the issue is known or that it is being exploited in the wild.

Elasticsearch Incorrect Authorization

An issue was discovered where improper authorization controls affected certain queries that could allow a malicious actor to circumvent Document Level Security in Elasticsearch and get access to documents that their roles would normally not allow.

Elasticsearch Uncaught Exception

An uncaught exception in Elasticsearch >= 8.4.0 and < 8.11.1 occurs when an encrypted PDF is passed to an attachment processor through the REST API. The Elasticsearch ingest node that attempts to parse the PDF file will crash. This does not happen with password-protected PDF files or with unencrypted PDF files.

Elasticsearch Incorrect Authorization in the Remote Cluster Security API key based security model

Incorrect Authorization issue exists in the API key based security model for Remote Cluster Security, which is currently in Beta, in Elasticsearch 8.10.0 and before 8.13.0. This allows a malicious user with a valid API key for a remote cluster configured to use the new Remote Cluster Security to read arbitrary documents from any index on the remote cluster, and only if they use the Elasticsearch custom transport protocol to issue requests with the target index ID, the shard ID and the document ID. None of Elasticsearch REST API endpoints are affected by this issue.

Elasticsearch StackOverflow vulnerability

A flaw was discovered in Elasticsearch, affecting document ingestion when an index template contains a dynamic field mapping of “passthrough” type. Under certain circumstances, ingesting documents in this index would cause a StackOverflow exception to be thrown and ultimately lead to a Denial of Service. Note that passthrough fields is an experimental feature.

elasticsearch: Insertion of Sensitive Information into Log File

An issue was discovered by Elastic whereby Watcher search input logged the search query results on DEBUG log level. This could lead to raw contents of documents stored in Elasticsearch to be printed in logs. Elastic has released 8.11.2 and 7.17.16 that resolves this issue by removing this excessive logging. This issue only affects users that use Watcher and have a Watch defined that uses the search input and additionally have set the search input’s logger to DEBUG or finer, for example using: org.elasticsearch.xpack.watcher.input.search, org.elasticsearch.xpack.watcher.input, org.elasticsearch.xpack.watcher, or wider, since the loggers are hierarchical.

Elasticsearch-hadoop Unsafe Deserialization

An issue was identified that allowed the unsafe deserialization of java objects from hadoop or spark configuration properties that could have been modified by authenticated users. Elastic would like to thank Yakov Shafranovich, with Amazon Web Services for reporting this issue.

elasticsearch: Improper Handling of Exceptional Conditions

It was identified that malformed scripts used in the script processor of an Ingest Pipeline could cause an Elasticsearch node to crash when calling the Simulate Pipeline API.

elasticsearch: DoS via a specifically formatted network request

A Denial of Service flaw was discovered in Elasticsearch. Using this vulnerability, an unauthenticated attacker could forcibly shut down an Elasticsearch node with a specifically formatted network request.

elasticsearch: privilege escalation vulnerability (ESA-2022-02)

A flaw was discovered in Elasticsearch 7.17.0’s upgrade assistant, in which upgrading from version 6.x to 7.x would disable the in-built protections on the security index, allowing authenticated users with “*” index permissions access to this index.

Elasticsearch privilege escalation

An issue was found with how API keys are created with the Fleet-Server service account. When an API key is created with a service account, it is possible that the API key could be created with higher privileges than intended. Using this vulnerability, a compromised Fleet-Server service account could escalate themselves to a super-user.

elasticsearch: document and field level security was not applied to searchable snapshots

Elasticsearch before 7.14.0 did not apply document and field level security to searchable snapshots. This could lead to an authenticated user gaining access to information that they are unauthorized to view.

All versions of Elastic Cloud Enterprise has the Elasticsearch “anonymous” user enabled by default in deployed clusters. While in the default setting the anonymous user has no permissions and is unable to successfully query any Elasticsearch APIs, an attacker could leverage the anonymous user to gain insight into certain details of a deployed cluster.

elasticsearch: uncontrolled recursion in Grok parser

In Elasticsearch versions before 7.13.3 and 6.8.17 an uncontrolled recursion vulnerability that could lead to a denial of service attack was identified in the Elasticsearch Grok parser. A user with the ability to submit arbitrary queries to Elasticsearch could create a malicious Grok query that will crash the Elasticsearch node.

elasticsearch: Document disclosure flaw when Document or Field Level Security is used

In Elasticsearch versions before 7.11.2 and 6.8.15 a document disclosure flaw was found when Document or Field Level Security is used. Search queries do not properly preserve security permissions when executing certain cross-cluster search queries. This could result in the search disclosing the existence of documents the attacker should not be able to view. This could result in an attacker gaining additional insight into potentially sensitive indices.

elasticsearch: Document disclosure flaw in the Elasticsearch suggester

Elasticsearch versions before 7.11.2 and 6.8.15 contain a document disclosure flaw was found in the Elasticsearch suggester and profile API when Document and Field Level Security are enabled. The suggester and profile API are normally disabled for an index when document level security is enabled on the index. Certain queries are able to enable the profiler and suggester which could lead to disclosing the existence of documents and fields the attacker should not be able to view.