Medium severity · published Oct 6, 2026
CVE-2026-102408
Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity in Elasticsearch Leading to Denial of Service
4.3
CVSS
0.3%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity (CWE-1333) in Elasticsearch can lead to denial of service via Regular Expression Exponential Blowup (CAPEC-492). The ES|QL CHUNK function's recursive chunking strategy accepts a list of user-supplied regular expressions used as text-splitting separators, without validating their computational complexity or bounding their execution time. An authenticated user with read access to any text-based index can submit a specially crafted regular expression that triggers catastrophic backtracking, consuming excessive CPU on Elasticsearch worker threads and degrading query throughput for other tenants on the affected node. The cluster does not crash as a result of this issue.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
Low
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
Low
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.3% · higher than 28% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
EL
Elasticsearch · Elastic
8.19.0 through 8.19.21; 9.1.0 through 9.3.8; 9.4.0 through 9.4.7; 9.5.0 through 9.5.4 · source: vendor, NVD
Affected product
EL
Elasticsearch
Elastic
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