Description

Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling (CWE-770) in Kibana can lead to denial of service via Excessive Allocation (CAPEC-130). An authenticated user who is authorized to manage maintenance windows could submit a specially crafted, malformed payload that causes the Kibana process to consume excessive resources. Kibana becomes unresponsive for all users and does not recover without manual intervention.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "6.5",
  "pubDate": "2026-08-13T20:17:25.513Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-08-13T20:17:25.513Z",
  "executiveSummary": "An Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability, classified as CWE-770, has been identified in Kibana, leading to a denial of service condition via Excessive Allocation (CAPEC-130). This flaw allows an authenticated user with specific authorization to manage maintenance windows to submit a specially crafted, malformed payload to the application.\nThe successful exploitation of this vulnerability results in the unbounded consumption of system resources by the Kibana process. Consequently, the application becomes entirely unresponsive for all users, causing a complete service outage that requires manual intervention, such as a service restart, to recover functionality.\nThe risk implication is high due to the potential for prolonged service unavailability and operational disruption. The attack capability requires prior authentication and specific authorization to manage maintenance windows, meaning the adversary must possess valid credentials and a designated privilege level to initiate the exploitation sequence.",
  "technicalDetails": "The root cause of the vulnerability stems from inadequate resource management, specifically the lack of limits, throttling, or validation mechanisms when processing input payloads within the maintenance window management functionality of Kibana.\nThe vulnerable component handles administrative operations related to maintenance windows. Because input data is processed without sufficient bounds checking or resource constraints, supplying a maliciously crafted payload forces the application to attempt parsing or allocating memory and processing power beyond safe thresholds.\nThe attack flow proceeds as follows: First, the authenticated adversary establishes a session with valid credentials and the requisite privileges to access the maintenance window management interface. Second, the attacker formulates a malformed payload designed to trigger excessive resource consumption. Third, the attacker transmits this payload to the endpoint handling maintenance window configurations.\nUpon receiving the request, the underlying Kibana process attempts to allocate and process the excessive data structure, resulting in unbounded resource exhaustion (CPU, memory, or thread starvation). This directly leads to application lockup and unresponsiveness.\nThe post-exploitation impact is limited to a denial of service condition, as the process hangs and fails to recover automatically, severing access for all legitimate users until administrative personnel manually intervene."
}