Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling in Kibana Leading to Denial of Service
Description:
Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling (CWE-770) in Kibana can lead to denial of service via Excessive Allocation (CAPEC-130). A specially crafted, malformed payload submitted to a Kibana visualization feature by an authenticated user holding only low-privileged access is not correctly validated before use. Processing the request causes unbounded memory growth in the Kibana process, which is terminated by the host once available memory is exhausted. Kibana then becomes unavailable to all users until the service is restarted.
Affected Versions:
- All versions from 8.0.0 up to and including 8.19.19
- All versions from 9.0.0 up to and including 9.4.4
Affected Configurations:
All configurations are affected
Solutions and Mitigations:
The issue is resolved in versions 8.19.20 and 9.4.5.
For Users that Cannot Upgrade:
Self-Managed
Disable the Timelion visualization type by adding the following setting to kibana.yml and restarting Kibana:
vis_type_timelion.enabled: false
Note that this removes the ability to create, edit, or render existing Timelion visualizations.
Cloud
For Elastic Cloud Hosted deployments, apply the same setting through the Kibana user settings override in the deployment edit view, then save to roll out the change.
vis_type_timelion.enabled: false
Indicators of Compromise (IOC)
No specific indicators of compromise have been identified for this vulnerability.
Elastic Cloud Serverless
Due to our continuous deployment and patching model, the vulnerability described in this security advisory was remediated in our Elastic Cloud Serverless offering before the public disclosure. The affected visualization type is additionally not available in Elastic Cloud Serverless.
Severity: CVSSv3.1: Medium ( 6.5 ) - CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CVE ID: CVE-2026-72659
Problem Type: CWE-770 - Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling
Impact: CAPEC-130 - Excessive Allocation