CVE-2026-75538
HighCVSS 8.2Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk40th percentile - higher than 40% of all known CVEs
Summary
In Erlang/OTP, when using the inet driver with {packet,4} mode, an attacker connecting to an open TCP port can exploit a signed overflow in packet length calculation, potentially overflowing the receive buffer and crashing the BEAM VM.
Risk Assessment
The vulnerability can lead to system crash (DoS), and in extreme cases remote code execution, though extremely unfeasible.
Recommendation
Update OTP to version 27.3.4.17, 28.5.0.6, or 29.0.6 (or later) depending on the line in use.
Other vulnerabilities in Erlang/OTP
See all- CVE-2026-28808Critical
An incorrect authorization vulnerability in Erlang OTP (inets modules) allows unauthenticated access to CGI scripts protected by directory rules when served via script_alias. The path mismatch between access control evaluation and script execution allows bypassing protections.
- 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-2026-74835High
The httpd HTTP server in the inets application fails to enforce a configured body-size limit on chunked requests. This may allow sending very large requests, potentially leading to server overload.
- CVE-2026-73812High
The check_header/3 function in httpd rejects duplicate Content-Length but does not check for the co-presence of Transfer-Encoding and Content-Length, which can lead to request smuggling desynchronization between front-end and back-end.
- CVE-2026-73276High
Gracefulness code ignored cases that should be rejected, resulting in possible HTTP Request Smuggling opportunities.
- 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-2026-54890High
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.
Original NVD description (English source)
An attacker that connects to an open Erlang TCP port that uses the inet driver with {packet,4} mode can use a signed overflow in an incorrect packet length calculation to overflow the receive buffer into the VM allocator area and beyond up to about 2 GB. This would easily trash the allocated block's allocator metadata footer, and the next block, if any, and most likely cause the BEAM VM to crash. Utilizing this with precision enough to achieve Remote Code Execution would be extremely unfeasible. This issue affects OTP from OTP 17.0 before OTP 27.3.4.17, from OTP 28.0 before OTP 28.5.0.6, and from OTP 29.0 before OTP 29.0.6, corresponding to erts from 6.0 before 15.2.7.13, from 16.0 before 16.4.0.6, and from 17.0 before 17.0.6. Whether OTP before OTP 17.0, corresponding to erts before 6.0, is affected is unknown.

