Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity in Elasticsearch Leading to Denial of Service

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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.

Source published

6 Oct 2026 19:31:39 UTC

Source modified

6 Oct 2026 19:56:06 UTC

Observed here

23 Oct 2026 15:48:27 UTC

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CVSS 3.1 · 4.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L