CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-31418 — An issue has been identified with how Elasticsearch handled incoming requests on the HTTP layer

High CVSS 7.5

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.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.5 (3.1)
Published
2023-10-26
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • elastic / elasticsearch
  • elastic / elastic_cloud_enterprise
  • elastic / elastic_cloud_enterprise / 3.6.0

Showing 3 representative product identities from 4 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

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Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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