n8n: Path Injection in Elasticsearch and ElasticSecurity Nodes via Unencoded Identifiers

Impact

The Elasticsearch and ElasticSecurity nodes built REST endpoints by interpolating user-provided identifiers straight into the request path. A value containing path separators or dot segments changed which endpoint the request actually reached, so an operation intended for one document could hit another index or a cluster administration endpoint instead, under the stored Elasticsearch credential. The patch encodes each identifier as a single URL path segment and rejects values that normalise away.

Patches

The issue has been fixed in n8n versions 1.123.76, 2.37.7, and 2.38.2. Users should upgrade to one of these versions or later to remediate the vulnerability.

Workarounds

If upgrading is not immediately possible, administrators should consider the following temporary mitigations:

• Restrict n8n instance access to fully trusted users only.
• Disable the affected nodes by adding n8n-nodes-base.elasticsearch and n8n-nodes-base.elasticSecurity to the NODES_EXCLUDE environment variable if they are not required.
• Audit existing workflows that use these nodes and ensure that index and document identifier fields do not accept externally-controlled input.

These workarounds do not fully remediate the risk and should only be used as short-term mitigation measures.