CVEvulnerability
CVE-2026-23943
6.9 MEDIUM
Official page ↗
- Status
- Modified
- Published
- 2026-03-13
- Last modified
- 2026-07-24
- Assigner
- 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db
- CVSS 4.0 (6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db)
- 6.9 MEDIUM — CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X
- CVSS 3.1 ([email protected])
- 5.3 MEDIUM — CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
- Weaknesses
- CWE-409
Description
Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Compression Bomb) vulnerability in Erlang OTP ssh (ssh_transport modules) allows Denial of Service via Resource Depletion.
The SSH transport layer advertises legacy zlib compression by default and inflates attacker-controlled payloads pre-authentication without any size limit, enabling reliable memory exhaustion DoS.
Two compression algorithms are affected:
* zlib: Activates immediately after key exchange, enabling unauthenticated attacks
* [email protected]: Activates post-authentication, enabling authenticated attacks
Each SSH packet can decompress ~255 MB from 256 KB of wire data (1029:1 amplification ratio). Multiple packets can rapidly exhaust available memory, causing OOM kills in memory-constrained environments.
This vulnerability is associated with program files lib/ssh/src/ssh_transport.erl and program routines ssh_transport:decompress/2, ssh_transport:handle_packet_part/4.
This issue affects OTP from OTP 17.0 before OTP 28.4.1, OTP 27.3.4.9 and OTP 26.2.5.18, corresponding to ssh from 3.0.1 before 5.5.1, 5.2.11.6 and 5.1.4.14.
Affected configurations
• erlang erlang\/otp (>= 17.0 < 26.2.5.18)
• erlang erlang\/otp (>= 27.0 < 27.3.4.9)
• erlang erlang\/otp (>= 28.0 < 28.4.1)
• erlang erlang\/ssh (>= 3.0.1 < 5.1.4.14)
• erlang erlang\/ssh (>= 5.2 < 5.2.11.6)
• erlang erlang\/ssh (>= 5.5 <= 5.5.1)
Related
Weakness · CWE (1)
- CWE-409 Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) weakness
References
- https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-23943.html Vendor Advisory
- https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/0c1c04b191f6ab940e8fcfabce39eb5a8a6440a4 Patch
- https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/43a87b949bdff12d629a8c34146711d9da93b1b1 Patch
- https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/93073c3bd338c60cd2bae715ce6a1d4ffc1a8fd3 Patch
- https://github.com/erlang/otp/security/advisories/GHSA-c836-qprm-jw9r Vendor Advisory
- https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-23943 Third Party Advisory
- https://www.erlang.org/doc/system/versions.html#order-of-versions Product