CVE-2026-49094 Elastic CVE debrief

Who should care

Organizations running Kibana instances with viewer-level user access, particularly those exposing analytics collections management functionality to broad user bases. Security teams should prioritize patching if Kibana serves critical observability or security monitoring functions where availability is essential.

Technical summary

The vulnerability exists in Kibana's analytics collections management endpoint, where insufficient input validation allows oversized values to trigger excessive resource allocation during request processing. An attacker with valid viewer-level credentials can exploit this via a single crafted HTTP request, causing CPU and memory exhaustion that renders the Kibana service unavailable to all users. The attack requires no user interaction and can be executed remotely over the network. Recovery requires manual intervention to restart or restore the Kibana service.

Defensive priority

medium

Recommended defensive actions

• Apply Kibana version 8.19.16 or later which contains the security fix for ESA-2026-39
• Restrict network access to Kibana analytics collections management endpoints to authorized administrative hosts where possible
• Monitor Kibana resource utilization for anomalous CPU and memory spikes that may indicate exploitation attempts
• Review and enforce appropriate role-based access controls to limit viewer-level access to only necessary users
• Implement resource limits and request size restrictions at reverse proxy or load balancer layers as a defense-in-depth measure

Evidence notes

The vulnerability description and CVSS vector (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H) are sourced from NVD with a 'Received' status. The vendor attribution to Elastic is derived from the [email protected] reference source and the discuss.elastic.co advisory URL, though marked with low confidence due to the 'Unknown Vendor' classification in the source data.

Official resources