Description

Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (CWE-400) in Kibana can lead denial of service via Excessive Allocation (CAPEC-130)

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "6.5",
  "pubDate": "2026-09-26T21:16:56.513Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-09-26T21:16:56.513Z",
  "executiveSummary": "Kibana is susceptible to an Uncontrolled Resource Consumption vulnerability (CWE-400), specifically manifesting as Excessive Allocation (CAPEC-130). This flaw allows unauthorized or authenticated actors to induce a Denial of Service (DoS) condition by forcing the application to allocate disproportionate system resources.\nThe vulnerability resides within the application's request processing logic, where inadequate validation or boundary constraints on incoming operations permit the exhaustion of memory, CPU, or internal processing queues. By triggering these resource-intensive operations, an attacker can degrade service availability, rendering the Kibana instance unresponsive to legitimate user traffic.\nThe risk implication is critical, as it directly impacts service continuity. Exploitation requires network access to the Kibana interface, though the complexity of the attack is generally low, as it often involves crafting specific, resource-heavy requests that the application fails to handle gracefully.\nThe primary risk is the loss of observability, log analysis, and data visualization capabilities provided by Kibana. Organizations must prioritize resource limiting and input validation to mitigate the impact of such resource exhaustion attacks.",
  "technicalDetails": "The vulnerability is rooted in the failure of Kibana to implement strict consumption limits on resources when processing complex or malformed requests. This fits the CWE-400 classification, where an application fails to effectively neutralize the influence of external input on the consumption of finite resources.\nThe mechanism of exploitation centers on CAPEC-130 (Excessive Allocation). When an attacker submits a payload that initiates an expensive operation—such as complex query execution, large aggregation request, or parsing of deeply nested objects—the application may attempt to allocate memory or CPU cycles beyond its operational capacity.\nThe attack flow proceeds as follows: 1) The attacker identifies an endpoint or API parameter within Kibana that invokes heavy computation or data retrieval. 2) The attacker crafts a request designed to maximize the computational cost (e.g., extremely large ranges, deep recursion, or multiple concurrent heavy queries). 3) The Kibana backend receives the request and, lacking proper rate limiting or complexity caps, attempts to fulfill the request by allocating substantial memory or spawning multiple threads. 4) This triggers an OOM (Out-of-Memory) event, CPU starvation, or pool exhaustion, causing the Node.js process to hang or crash.\nBecause Kibana runs primarily on a Node.js event loop, this type of resource exhaustion is particularly effective. A single blocked event loop caused by synchronous processing of a malicious payload can stop the entire application from responding to other users. This vulnerability does not inherently require high privileges, although certain APIs may be gated; if the endpoint is accessible, the impact remains the same.\nThe affected component is typically the query execution engine or the API interface handling large-scale data ingestion and visualization rendering. Post-exploitation, the service remains unavailable until the process is restarted by the supervisor or orchestrator. If the attacker continues to send the payload, they can maintain a persistent DoS state. The vulnerability is network-exposed, assuming the Kibana instance is accessible via the HTTP/HTTPS protocol from the attacker's network segment."
}