CVE-2026-54890
HighCVSS 7.5Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk31th percentile - higher than 31% of all known CVEs
Summary
A vulnerability in the External Term Format (ETF) decoder in ERTS causes an integer underflow when processing crafted binary data. This leads to allocating huge memory and crashing the entire Erlang/VM node.
Risk Assessment
An unauthenticated attacker can remotely crash the Erlang/OTP node, which cannot be caught by supervision or try/catch. Affects applications decoding ETF from untrusted sources.
Recommendation
Update Erlang/OTP to version 29.0.4, 28.5.0.4, or 27.3.4.15. Avoid decoding ETF from untrusted sources; if necessary, apply additional validation before deserialization.
Other vulnerabilities in Erlang/OTP
See all- CVE-2026-28808Critical
In Erlang OTP (inets module), an incorrect authorization vulnerability exists. When script_alias maps a URL prefix to a directory outside DocumentRoot, mod_auth evaluates directory access controls against the DocumentRoot path while mod_cgi executes the script at the ScriptAlias path. This mismatch allows unauthenticated access to CGI scripts protected by directory rules.
- CVE-2026-23941Critical
In Erlang OTP (inets httpd module), an HTTP Request Smuggling vulnerability exists. The server does not reject or normalize duplicate Content-Length headers. The first value is used, while common proxies use the last, enabling front-end/back-end desynchronization and injection of attacker-controlled bytes as the start of the next request.
- CVE-2016-10253Critical
An issue was discovered in Erlang/OTP 18.x related to the generation of compiled regular expressions, which is vulnerable to a heap overflow. Regular expressions using a malformed extpattern can indirectly specify an offset used as an array index.
- CVE-2026-58227High
A vulnerability in the Erlang/OTP SSL application allows memory exhaustion by sending a crafted certificate chain during TLS/DTLS handshake. Lack of cycle detection in the certificate chain building function causes unbounded recursion, leading to BEAM node crash.
- CVE-2026-55953High
The TLS 1.2 (and earlier) and DTLS client in Erlang/OTP does not verify that the cipher suite selected by the server in ServerHello was among the suites offered by the client. An on-path attacker can select an anonymous cipher suite, bypassing certificate and hostname verification, allowing interception and modification of traffic.
- CVE-2026-55737High
In Erlang OTP, a signed to unsigned conversion error and out-of-bounds heap write vulnerability exists when decoding a crafted ETF binary via binary_to_term/1. This can corrupt the BEAM heap pointer and crash the virtual machine.
- CVE-2026-47078Medium
In the zip module of Erlang OTP stdlib, a relative path traversal vulnerability allows writing files outside the intended extraction directory via a crafted zip archive. The zip:check_dir_level/2 function improperly validates paths containing ../ sequences.
- CVE-2026-42792High
In Erlang OTP (epmd), a connection slot exhaustion vulnerability allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to permanently terminate the epmd daemon. The do_accept function incorrectly treats EMFILE/ENFILE errors as fatal instead of recoverable.
- CVE-2026-55952High
Vulnerability in the Erlang/OTP ssl application. An unauthenticated attacker can send a crafted TLS 1.3 ClientHello, crashing the session ticket handler and making TLS 1.3 unusable until the ssl application is restarted.
- CVE-2026-55950Medium
TOCTOU race condition in the ssl module (dtls_packet_demux) in Erlang/OTP. An unauthenticated remote attacker can send multiple ClientHello messages from the same source, causing a race and crash of the demux process, terminating all active DTLS sessions on that listener. The attack is repeatable and requires no authentication.
Original NVD description (English source)
Integer Underflow (Wrap or Wraparound) vulnerability in erlang otp erlang/otp (erts modules), erlang otp erts (erts modules) allows Forced Integer Overflow, Excessive Allocation. This vulnerability is associated with program files erts/emulator/beam/external.c, emulator/beam/external.c. The BIT_BINARY_EXT tag (77) handler in the External Term Format (ETF) decoder accepts an encoding with both length and trailing-bits fields set to zero. The subsequent computation of the bitstring size underflows an unsigned integer, producing a value of roughly 2^64 that is then passed as a memory allocation size. The allocator aborts the entire node with a message such as "Cannot allocate 2305843009213693951 bytes of memory (of type binary)". The crash is a VM-level abort, not an Erlang-level exception. It cannot be intercepted by supervision trees, by try/catch, or by passing the [safe] option to binary_to_term/2 (which only restricts atom creation and does not perform structural validation of binary encodings). Any application that decodes ETF from untrusted sources via binary_to_term/1,2 or enif_binary_to_term() is exposed. The Erlang distribution protocol also decodes incoming terms through the same code path, but distribution is expected to run on trusted networks per the OTP Secure Coding Guidelines (DSG-011). This issue affects OTP from OTP 27.0 before OTP 29.0.4, OTP 28.5.0.4 and OTP 27.3.4.15, corresponding to erts from 15.0 before 17.0.4, 16.4.0.4 and 15.2.7.11.

