It was discovered by Elastic engineering that when elasticsearch-certutil CLI tool is used with the csr option in order to create a new Certificate Signing Requests, the associated private key that is generated is stored on disk unencrypted even if the --pass parameter is passed in the command invocation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 versions before 7.10.0 and 6.8.14 have an information disclosure issue when audit logging and the emit_request_body option is enabled. The Elasticsearch audit log could contain sensitive information such as password hashes or authentication tokens. This could allow an Elasticsearch administrator to view these details.

Elasticsearch versions before 6.8.13 and 7.9.2 contain a document disclosure flaw when Document or Field Level Security is used. Search queries do not properly preserve security permissions when executing certain complex 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.

In Elasticsearch before 7.9.0 and 6.8.12 a field disclosure flaw was found when running a scrolling search with Field Level Security. If a user runs the same query another more privileged user recently ran, the scrolling search can leak fields that should be hidden. This could result in an attacker gaining additional permissions against a restricted index.

The fix for CVE-2020-7009 was found to be incomplete. Elasticsearch versions from 6.7.0 to 6.8.7 and 7.0.0 to 7.6.1 contain a privilege escalation flaw if an attacker is able to create API keys and also authentication tokens. An attacker who is able to generate an API key and an authentication token can perform a series of steps that result in an authentication token being generated with elevated privileges.

Elasticsearch versions from 6.7.0 before 6.8.8 and 7.0.0 before 7.6.2 contain a privilege escalation flaw if an attacker is able to create API keys. An attacker who is able to generate an API key can perform a series of steps that result in an API key being generated with elevated privileges.