Description

Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling (CWE-770) in Kibana can lead to a denial of service via Excessive Allocation (CAPEC-130). An authenticated user with low-level permissions could submit a specially crafted request that causes excessive resource consumption, which may render Kibana unavailable.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "6.5",
  "pubDate": "2026-09-01T20:17:13.460Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-09-01T20:17:13.460Z",
  "executiveSummary": "This vulnerability involves an instance of Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling (CWE-770) within the Kibana application, exposing it to potential Denial of Service (DoS) attacks via Excessive Allocation (CAPEC-130).\nThe flaw allows an authenticated user, even one with low-level permissions, to submit specifically crafted requests that force the application to consume disproportionate amounts of system resources, such as CPU or memory.\nThe primary impact of this vulnerability is the degradation or total loss of service availability for the Kibana instance, affecting all users. This represents a significant risk to operational continuity, as an attacker can effectively disable the monitoring and data visualization capabilities provided by the platform without requiring administrative privileges.\nExploitation is feasible by any authenticated user, meaning the attack vector is accessible to standard or restricted user accounts. There is no requirement for high-level system access, making this a critical availability concern for multi-user environments where user roles may not be strictly enforced or vetted.",
  "technicalDetails": "The root cause of this vulnerability lies in the lack of robust input validation and resource monitoring mechanisms within the Kibana request handling pipeline. Specifically, the application fails to implement rate limiting, request size constraints, or concurrency controls for resource-intensive operations initiated by users.\nWhen an authenticated user transmits a crafted request—likely targeting an endpoint responsible for complex data aggregation, search execution, or rendering—the application attempts to process this request without verifying if the requested resources exceed safe thresholds. Because these operations are unthrottled, the application allocates excessive memory or CPU cycles to fulfill the request.\nThe attack flow follows a predictable pattern: first, the malicious actor authenticates to the Kibana interface. Second, they identify an endpoint that triggers heavy backend processing. Third, they submit the crafted payload, which forces the Kibana Node.js process to perform high-complexity tasks, such as unbounded recursive data transformation or the instantiation of massive object graphs in memory.\nAs the application allocates resources to handle these malicious requests, the underlying system experiences resource exhaustion (e.g., heap exhaustion or CPU pinning). This leads to a degradation in performance and, eventually, a total failure of the service, rendering it unresponsive to both legitimate users and monitoring systems.\nThe vulnerability is persistent across the application's request-handling lifecycle. Because Kibana relies on asynchronous event-driven I/O, the consumption of resources by a single, unconstrained malicious operation can block the event loop, effectively stalling the processing of all other concurrent requests.\nFurthermore, because the vulnerability is exploitable by low-level authenticated users, it bypasses standard functional authorization checks that are typically focused on data access rather than system performance and availability. The attack does not necessarily require the ability to run arbitrary code, but rather the ability to induce an unhandled or unconstrained state in the application logic that persists until the service crashes or is restarted by an administrator."
}