What is CVE-2021-37937?

CVE-2021-37937 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Elastic Elasticsearch, classified under Improper Privilege Management. CVSS score: 5.9/10. Published 2023-11-22.

How severe is CVE-2021-37937?

Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.9 out of 10.

Privilege escalation in Elastic Elasticsearch

CVE-2021-37937

An issue was found with how API keys are created with the Fleet-Server service account. When an API key is created with a service account, it is possible that the API key could be created with higher privileges than intended. Using this vulnerability, a compromised Fleet-Server service account could escalate themselves to a super-user.

Vulnerability class: Privilege Escalation

Published 2023-11-22 · last modified 2026-06-17.

CVSS v3 metric

CVSS v3 base score 5.9 (Medium). Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:N.

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.007 (51.8th percentile), scored 2026-09-30.

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 52nd percentile — 51.8% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.007 · newest: 0.007 · change: 0.000

Affected products

Elastic Elasticsearch — versions 7.13.0

Weakness classification (CWE)

CWE-269 — Improper Privilege Management

References

discuss.elastic.co/t/elastic-stack-7-14-1-security-update/283077 (Vendor Advisory)
www.elastic.co/community/security (Vendor Advisory)

Frequently asked questions

What is CVE-2021-37937?: CVE-2021-37937 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Elastic Elasticsearch, classified under Improper Privilege Management. CVSS score: 5.9/10. Published 2023-11-22.
How severe is CVE-2021-37937?: Medium severity. CVSS v3 base score is 5.9 out of 10.