Threat Intelligence Database

Allocation of resources without limits in Erlang/OTP public_key certificate path validation allows a remote unauthenticated attacker to cause denial of service by sending a crafted X.509 certificate chain during the TLS handshake. During RFC 5280 policy processing in public_key:pkix_path_validation/3, the certificate policy tree maintained by pubkey_policy_tree grows without an upper bound. When a certificate chain contains M policies per certificate and K certificates, the tree grows on the order of M^K nodes because pubkey_policy_tree:add_leaves/2 and pubkey_policy_tree:add_leaf_siblings/2 extend the tree per policy per certificate. A modest chain with many policies per certificate is enough to pin BEAM schedulers and exhaust the node's memory, taking down the entire VM. The attacker only needs to be able to present a certificate chain to the victim, which is the normal precondition for a TLS handshake, so exploitation succeeds against any incoming or outgoing TLS connection that validates the peer's chain (the default for SSL/TLS clients and mutual-TLS servers). This is the same vulnerability class as OpenSSL's X509_verify_cert policy tree DoS. This vulnerability is associated with program files lib/public_key/src/pubkey_policy_tree.erl and program routines pubkey_policy_tree:add_leaves/2 and pubkey_policy_tree:add_leaf_siblings/2. This issue affects OTP from OTP 26.2 before OTP 29.0.4, OTP 28.5.0.4 and OTP 27.3.4.15, corresponding to public_key from 1.15 before 1.21.4, 1.20.3.4 and 1.17.1.5.

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.

Classic buffer overflow in the Erlang/OTP megaco flex scanner C driver allows a remote unauthenticated attacker to corrupt the driver's memory (and potentially achieve remote code execution or a denial-of-service crash) by sending a single text-encoded H.248/Megaco message containing an oversized property parm name. When tokenizing a Local/Remote descriptor, mfs_load_property_groups extracts the attacker-controlled property name (bounded only by the message length) and, when no value follows, formats it into a fixed 512-byte error_msg field of the MfsErlDrvData struct using an unchecked sprintf call. Names longer than roughly 452 bytes overflow into the immediately following struct fields (text_buf, text_ptr, term_spec, term_spec_size, term_spec_index), overwriting live pointers and counters with attacker-chosen bytes. Subsequent scanner code writes and frees through the corrupted pointers, producing arbitrary write and arbitrary free primitives inside the BEAM VM process, which can be leveraged for remote code execution. On builds compiled with _FORTIFY_SOURCE the overflow is detected at runtime and terminates the process with SIGABRT, resulting in denial of service. The overflow occurs in the flex scanner before any grammar or Megaco-level authentication processing, so exploitation requires only network reachability to the megaco transport port on a node configured with {scanner, flex}. This vulnerability is associated with program files lib/megaco/src/flex/megaco_flex_scanner_drv.flex.src and program routines mfs_load_property_groups. This issue affects OTP from OTP 17.0 before OTP 29.0.4, OTP 28.5.0.4 and OTP 27.3.4.15, corresponding to megaco from 3.17.1 before 4.9.1, 4.8.3.1 and 4.7.2.2. Versions prior to OTP 17.0 are also affected but are not listed because the OTP version scheme is only defined from OTP 17.0 onwards.

The Erlang/OTP ssl application does not detect cycles when reconstructing an incomplete peer certificate chain during a TLS or DTLS handshake. In ssl_certificate:handle_incomplete_chain/5, the received chain is passed to ssl_certificate:build_certificate_chain/5, which walks issuer relationships via ssl_certificate:do_certificate_chain/7 with no cycle detection and no depth limit. When the peer supplies two mutually cross-signed certificates in unordered form (A issues B, B issues A), the issuer lookup alternates between the two certificates and the pair of functions recurses indefinitely, growing the call stack and chain accumulator without bound. An unauthenticated remote attacker can send a crafted certificate chain in a TLS or DTLS Certificate handshake message to exhaust available memory and crash the BEAM node. Only a TCP connection and a partial handshake are required; no authentication or completed handshake is needed, and both TLS/DTLS servers and clients are affected when processing peer certificate messages. This issue affects OTP from OTP 23.2 before OTP 29.0.4, OTP 28.5.0.4 and OTP 27.3.4.15, corresponding to ssl from 10.2 before 11.7.4, 11.6.0.4 and 11.2.12.11.

The Erlang/OTP ssl TLS 1.2 (and earlier) and DTLS client does not verify that the cipher suite selected by the server in ServerHello was among the suites offered by the client in ClientHello. The client-side tls_handshake:hello/5 handler validates the negotiated protocol version and the downgrade sentinel but hands the server-chosen suite directly to ssl_handshake:handle_server_hello_extensions/9, which installs it without a membership check. The TLS 1.3 client path performs this check (per RFC 8446), so it is not affected. An on-path attacker between the client and the intended server can respond with a ServerHello selecting an anonymous key exchange suite such as TLS_DH_anon_* or TLS_ECDH_anon_* that the client never offered. Anonymous suites do not require the server to present a certificate, so the entire verify_peer and cacerts configuration is bypassed: the attacker completes the handshake with its own ephemeral parameters, no certificate is validated, no hostname is checked, and ssl:connect returns {ok, Socket}. All subsequent application traffic is readable and modifiable by the attacker. This issue affects OTP from OTP 17.0 before OTP 29.0.4, OTP 28.5.0.4 and OTP 27.3.4.15, corresponding to ssl from 5.3.4 before 11.7.4, 11.6.0.4 and 11.2.12.11.

Signed to Unsigned Conversion Error and Out-of-bounds Write vulnerability in Erlang OTP erts allows an attacker who can supply a crafted Erlang external term format (ETF) binary to binary_to_term/1 to corrupt the BEAM heap pointer and crash the virtual machine. When decoding a LARGE_TUPLE_EXT term, the validation pass decoded_size() in erts/emulator/beam/external.c reads the 32-bit arity field as unsigned (get_uint32()), while the decode pass dec_term() reads the same field as a signed 32-bit integer (get_int32()) into an int. An arity wire value of 0x80000000 passes validation as 2147483648 but decodes as -2147483648, so the subsequent hp += n moves the heap allocation pointer backward. Neither pass enforces the runtime tuple-arity limit MAX_ARITYVAL. The result is an out-of-bounds heap write; in practice the VM detects an impossible heap size and aborts, denying service. The required padding is large when uncompressed but the compressed-ETF envelope shrinks it to a small payload on the wire. This issue affects OTP from OTP 25.0 before OTP 29.0.4, OTP 28.5.0.4 and OTP 27.3.4.15, corresponding to erts from 13.0 before 17.0.4, 16.4.0.4 and 15.2.7.11.

Relative Path Traversal vulnerability in Erlang OTP (stdlib zip module) allows writing files outside the intended extraction directory via a crafted zip archive. zip:unzip/1,2 and zip:extract/1,2 validate entry paths using zip:check_dir_level/2, which tracks directory depth as a running integer counter: .. decrements it, normal path components increment it. The caller rejects only paths where the final counter value is less than zero. A path such as ../x/y causes the counter to go negative mid-traversal then recover to zero, passing validation while resolving to a location outside the extraction directory when joined with the current working directory via add_cwd. This vulnerability is associated with program file lib/stdlib/src/zip.erl. This issue affects OTP from OTP 27.1 before OTP 29.0.4, OTP 28.5.0.4 and OTP 27.3.4.15, corresponding to stdlib from 6.1 before 8.0.3, 7.3.0.1 and 6.2.2.4.

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.

The Erlang/OTP ssl application does not validate that the PSK identity list and binder list carried in a TLS 1.3 ClientHello pre-shared key extension have equal length before passing them to the session ticket handler. In tls_handshake_1_3:handle_pre_shared_key/3, an OfferedPreSharedKeys record with a mismatched number of identities and binders is forwarded directly to tls_server_session_ticket:use/4, which crashes the session ticket handler process. An unauthenticated remote attacker can send a single crafted ClientHello to a TLS 1.3 server with session tickets enabled (stateful or stateless mode) and permanently disrupt session ticket handling on that listener. New TLS 1.3 handshakes complete but subsequently crash when the server attempts to issue a session ticket, effectively making TLS 1.3 unusable on the affected listener until the ssl application is restarted. TLS 1.2 connections are not affected. This issue affects OTP from OTP 22.2 before OTP 29.0.3, OTP 28.5.0.3 and OTP 27.3.4.14, corresponding to ssl from 9.5 before 11.7.3, 11.6.0.3 and 11.2.12.10.

Time-of-check Time-of-use (TOCTOU) race condition vulnerability in Erlang/OTP ssl (dtls_packet_demux module) allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to crash all active DTLS sessions on a listener. A DTLS server listener uses a single shared dtls_packet_demux gen_server process to route incoming UDP datagrams to the correct connection handler. When a DTLS client reconnects rapidly from the same source address and port (sending multiple ClientHello messages in quick succession), a race condition in the demux's internal gb_trees key-value store causes a {key_exists, {old, Client}} crash, terminating the demux process. Because the demux is shared across all DTLS associations on that listener, its crash immediately kills every active DTLS session, not just the attacker's. The attack is pre-authentication: the attacker only needs to send UDP datagrams containing valid ClientHello messages from the same source IP and port before the intermediate DOWN monitor message is processed by the gen_server. No credentials, no completed handshake, and no special configuration are required, and the crash can be repeated indefinitely to create a persistent denial of service for all clients of that listener. This vulnerability is associated with program file lib/ssl/src/dtls_packet_demux.erl. This issue affects OTP from OTP 25.3 before OTP 29.0.3, OTP 28.5.0.3 and OTP 27.3.4.14, corresponding to ssl from 10.9 before 11.7.3, 11.6.0.3 and 11.2.12.10.