Uncontrolled Recursion (CWE-674) in the Elasticsearch wildcard matching helper can lead to a denial of service via Excessive Allocation (CAPEC-130). The matcher used to resolve wildcard patterns against names is implemented recursively and had no bound on recursion depth or on the total number of match operations performed. A search request containing a wildcard pattern with a large number of wildcard groups, evaluated against a sufficiently long name, exhausts the thread stack. Elasticsearch treats a stack overflow as an unrecoverable condition and shuts the node down, so the request terminates the affected node rather than failing gracefully.
{
"cpes": [
"cpe:2.3:a:elastic:elasticsearch:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*",
"cpe:2.3:a:elastic:elasticsearch:*:*:*:*:*:maven:*:*"
],
"severity": "Medium"
}