Searching Opencast may cause a denial of service

Exploitation

No confirmed exploitation recorded. Patch Next marks exploitation only from CISA KEV.

CVSS

6.5 · CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

EPSS

• CVE-2024-52797: 0.92% estimated exploitation activity in the next 30 days; percentile 60.37 (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-03). This is a model estimate, not proof of exploitation or customer exposure.

As published by the source; long descriptions are shortened.

Impact First noticed in Opencast 13 and 14, Opencast's Elasticsearch integration may generate syntactically invalid Elasticsearch queries in relation to previously acceptable search queries. From Opencast version 11.4 and newer, Elasticsearch queries are retried a configurable number of times in the case of error to handle temporary losses of connection to Elasticsearch. These invalid queries would fail, causing the retry mechanism to begin requerying with the same syntactically invalid query immediately, in an infinite loop. This causes a massive increase in log size which can in some cases cause a denial of service due to disk exhaustion. Patches Opencast 13.10 and Opencast 14.3 contain patches (https://github.com/opencast/opencast/pull/5150, and https://github.com/opencast/opencast/pull/5033) which address the base issue, with Opencast 16.7 containing changes which harmonize the search behaviour between the admin UI and external API. Users are strongly recommended to upgrade as…

Published by the source

20 Nov 2024, 22:46 UTC

Last modified by the source

28 Oct 2025, 19:47 UTC

Source last checked

26 Oct 2026, 16:40 UTC

1. Revision 1 · created · 26 Oct 2026

   Published from ghsa record GHSA-jh6x-7xfg-9cq2

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# Patch Next advisory brief: CVE-2024-52797

Advisory: Searching Opencast may cause a denial of service
IDs: CVE-2024-52797, GHSA-jh6x-7xfg-9cq2
Record: https://patchnext.com/advisories/cve-2024-52797 (revision 1, source checked 26 Oct 2026, 16:40 UTC)
Inventory: none attached. This brief comes from a public page and does not say whether any deployment is affected.
Severity: Medium (CVSS 6.5)
Exploitation: no confirmed exploitation recorded. Patch Next confirms exploitation only from CISA KEV.
Vendor response: Vendor fix available; fixed versions by package: org.opencastproject:opencast-elasticsearch-impl 16.7, 14.3, 13.10. A vendor fix does not mean a deployment is fixed.

## Affected components
- Maven org.opencastproject:opencast-elasticsearch-impl: affected >= 14.0, < 14.3; >= 15.0, <= 16.6; >= 11.4, < 13.10; fixed in 16.7, 13.10, 14.3

## Suggested inspection (read-only)
- Maven org.opencastproject:opencast-elasticsearch-impl: check the installed version with your package manager.

## Supported action
Upgrade each affected component to a fixed version on its release line. For a transitive dependency, upgrade the parent package or add an override or constraint, then regenerate the lockfile. Redeploy every environment that ran an affected version.

## Required regression checks
- Run the test suite and a production build.
- Exercise the features that depend on org.opencastproject:opencast-elasticsearch-impl.
- Repeat the inspection and confirm that only fixed versions remain installed.

## Rollback considerations
- Keep the previous lockfile and deployment artifact. Rolling back reinstates the vulnerable version, so apply any documented mitigation while you fix forward.

## Unresolved questions
- Which deployments run an affected version?
- Exploitation status can change. Check again before lowering the priority.
- Mark the work resolved only after the fixed version is verified in production.

## Sources
- Verified: https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-jh6x-7xfg-9cq2 (GitHub-reviewed advisory GHSA-jh6x-7xfg-9cq2 lists affected ranges: Maven org.opencastproject:opencast-elasticsearch-impl >=14.0 =15.0 =11.4 <13.10)

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