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CVE-2026-42792VulnerabilityPublished

CVE-2026-42792: Erlang OTP · Improper Handling of Exceptional Conditions

Affects Erlang OTPSource CVE Database V5

0

Not known to be exploited · CVSS 6.3 Medium : upgrade to 865d203e4a6a8f44179eced9e1428f9259e4a3bb when convenient.

Data as of 25 Oct 2026, 19:02 UTC

CVSS 4.0 base score
6.3Medium
How severe the flaw is on the 0–10 CVSS scale.
EPSS
0.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days – higher than 37% of CVEsExploit Prediction Scoring System: the likelihood attackers will use this flaw soon.
Patch
Available – fixed in 865d203e4a6a8f44179eced9e1428f9259e4a3bb, 17.0.4, 29.0.4
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

Exploitation evidence

  1. Disclosed: evidence found.

    CVE published 27 Jul 2026

  2. Detectable: no evidence on record.

    No public nuclei template indexed

  3. Weaponised: no evidence on record.

    No public exploit code indexed in Metasploit or Exploit-DB

  4. Exploited in the wild: no evidence on record.

    Not in CISA KEV and no source reports exploitation

  5. Observed by OffSeq Mirage: no evidence on record.

    No attack traffic recorded by OffSeq Mirage sensors

A missing step is not evidence of safety. Sources: cve.org (opens in a new tab), the Metasploit, Exploit-DB and nuclei-templates index as of 2026-10-25.

What to do

Upgrade OTP to 865d203e4a6a8f44179eced9e1428f9259e4a3bb; erts to 17.0.4; erlang/otp to 29.0.4.

Affected software

ProductAffectedFixed in
ErlangOTPAffected
  • >=6.0 <17.0.4
Fixed in–
ErlangOTPAffected
  • >=17.0 <29.0.4
Fixed in
  • 865d203e4a6a8f44179eced9e1428f9259e4a3bb
GitHubertspkg:github/ertsOther threatsAffected
  • >=6.0 <17.0.4
Fixed in
  • 17.0.4
GitHuberlang/otppkg:github/erlang/otpOther threatsAffected
  • >=17.0 <29.0.4
Fixed in
  • 29.0.4

CPE configurations (1)

  • cpe:2.3:a:erlang:erlang\/otp:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*

Check your own hosts for these packages with threat-finder (opens in a new tab), our free open-source scanner.

AI-suggested

If you cannot patch yet, operators should consider increasing file descriptor limits for epmd and implementing external connection rate limiting or firewall rules to limit the number of simultaneous connections to epmd. Manual intervention may be required to recover epmd.service and epmd.socket if they have failed due to systemd start-rate-limiting.

Description

Improper Handling of Exceptional Conditions vulnerability in Erlang OTP erts (epmd) allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to permanently terminate the Erlang Port Mapper Daemon (epmd) via connection slot exhaustion. The do_accept function in erts/epmd/src/epmd_srv.c calls epmd_cleanup_exit() when accept(2) returns EMFILE (per-process file descriptor limit reached) or ENFILE (system-wide file descriptor limit reached), rather than treating these as recoverable conditions. An attacker can exhaust epmd's file descriptor slots by holding many TCP connections open while periodically sending a single byte to reset the idle timeout, then causing accept(2) to return EMFILE, which kills the daemon. epmd has no per-source-IP connection cap, making the attack feasible from a single source. On Debian/Ubuntu default packaging the impact is amplified: the systemd unit inherits a low file descriptor soft limit, and repeated daemon deaths trigger systemd's start-rate-limit, permanently failing both epmd.service and epmd.socket and requiring manual operator intervention to recover. This issue affects OTP from OTP 17.0 before OTP 29.0.4, OTP 28.5.0.4 and OTP 27.3.4.15.

References

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