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 can 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": "2026-09-01T20:17:16.970Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-09-01T20:17:16.970Z",
  "executiveSummary": "This vulnerability is classified as an Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling (CWE-770), specifically manifesting as Excessive Allocation (CAPEC-130) within the Kibana platform.\nThe flaw allows an authenticated user to perform a denial-of-service (DoS) attack by submitting a specially crafted request that triggers uncontrolled resource consumption, such as memory or CPU exhaustion.\nThe impact of this vulnerability is the potential unavailability of the Kibana service, disrupting monitoring, data visualization, and management capabilities for all users.\nExploitation requires the attacker to possess authenticated access to the Kibana instance. No advanced privileges beyond basic authentication are explicitly stated as requirements for triggering the resource-heavy operation.\nThe risk implication is high for environments where Kibana is a critical component of security operations or observability, as it allows a malicious or compromised user to intentionally induce a system crash or service hang.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability resides in the request processing logic of Kibana, which fails to implement sufficient bounds, rate limits, or resource quotas on incoming requests.\nWhen an authenticated user transmits a malicious payload, the application allocates system resources proportional to the request's structure without validating the resulting computational cost.\nIn the context of CAPEC-130, the attack flow begins with the attacker identifying an endpoint that initiates a computationally expensive operation—such as a complex query or data transformation—without internal circuit breakers.\nBy submitting a crafted request designed to maximize resource usage, the attacker forces the Kibana process to exceed its allocated memory footprint or saturate CPU cycles.\nBecause there are no throttling mechanisms in place, the application attempts to process the request to completion, leading to thread starvation, garbage collection thrashing (in Node.js environments), or memory exhaustion errors.\nIf the request handling architecture does not isolate this task, the exhaustion effectively leads to an application-level denial of service, rendering the web interface unresponsive to legitimate users.\nThe vulnerability is persistent across the execution flow: from the initial ingress of the HTTP request, through the validation layer (which lacks depth), and into the service layer responsible for resource allocation.\nSuccessful exploitation results in the destabilization of the Kibana instance. If the underlying server does not have robust resource containerization or OS-level limits (like cgroups), the instability may propagate to the host system.\nPost-exploitation, the attacker may repeat the request to maintain the denial-of-service state, ensuring that the service remains unavailable for the duration of the attack, thereby hindering incident response and observability workflows."
}