Uncontrolled Recursion (CWE-674) in Elasticsearch can lead to Denial of Service via a specially crafted, deeply nested request submitted to the aggregation feature of the search API. Elasticsearch contains an uncontrolled recursion weakness in its search aggregation processing. An authenticated user with read access to a single index can submit a specially crafted request containing deeply nested aggregation definitions. Processing this request triggers unbounded recursive execution that exhausts the server processs available resources, causing the affected node to terminate. The node does not recover automatically and requires manual intervention to restore service.
Weakness
The product does not properly control the amount of recursion that takes place, consuming excessive resources, such as allocated memory or the program stack.