NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra · error · ElasticException

Error parsing response: {message}

Error message

Error parsing response: {message}

What it means

Thrown by ElasticConnection.executeRawStatement when JsonParser.parseReader fails to parse the response body as a JsonObject (JsonParseException). The HTTP call succeeded but the body is not valid JSON or not a JSON object, so grabResponse's getAsJsonObject() / parse fails.

Source

Thrown at Ghidra/Features/BSim/src/main/java/ghidra/features/bsim/query/elastic/ElasticConnection.java:212

			connection.setDoOutput(true);
			try (Writer writer = new OutputStreamWriter(connection.getOutputStream())) {
				writer.write(body);
			}
			lastResponseCode = connection.getResponseCode();
			JsonObject resp = grabResponse(connection);
			if (!lastRequestSuccessful()) {
				throw new ElasticException(parseErrorJSON(resp));
			}
			return resp;
		}
		catch (URISyntaxException e) {
			throw new ElasticException("Error parsing URL: " + e.getMessage());
		}
		catch (IOException e) {
			throw new ElasticException("Error sending request: " + e.getMessage());
		}
		catch (JsonParseException e) {
			throw new ElasticException("Error parsing response: " + e.getMessage());
		}
		finally {
			if (connection != null) {
				connection.disconnect();
			}
		}

	}

	/**
	 * Execute an elasticsearch command where we are not expecting a response
	 * @param command is the type of the command
	 * @param path is the overarching {@code index/type/<command>}
	 * @param body is the JSON document describing the request
	 * @throws ElasticException for any problems with the connecting
	 */
	public void executeStatementNoResponse(String command, String path, String body)
			throws ElasticException {

View on GitHub (pinned to d5f144c24d)

Solutions

1. Verify the hostURL actually points at Elasticsearch (and not a proxy returning HTML).
2. Capture the raw response body (e.g. via curl) to confirm it is a JSON object.
3. Check for an intermediate proxy/gateway and bypass or configure it correctly.
4. Ensure the ES endpoint path is correct for the command issued.

try {
    return conn.executeRawStatement(command, path, body);
} catch (ElasticException e) {
    if (e.getMessage().startsWith("Error parsing response")) {
        // capture raw body via curl to confirm it is JSON; check for proxy
    } else throw e;
}

When it happens

Trigger: executeRawStatement where the response body is empty, is HTML (e.g. a proxy error page), is malformed JSON, or is a JSON array/scalar rather than an object. grabResponse parses then calls getAsJsonObject(), which throws on non-object.

Common situations: A reverse proxy/load balancer returning an HTML error page instead of JSON; truncated response body; wrong endpoint returning a non-JSON payload; response encoding issues; an ES plugin intercepting the request.

Related errors

• connection.getResponseMessage()
• {type} : {reason}
• Error sending request: {message}
• Error parsing response:
• Bad base64 encoding

AI-assisted analysis of NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra@d5f144c24d (2026-08-14). Data as JSON: /api/errors/01a5a11efad9a1b7. Report an issue: GitHub.