CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-54890

HighCVSS 7.5
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.39%

31th 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
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.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS