CVE-2026-23943
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
* zlib@openssh.com: 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 until OTP 28.4.1, 27.3.4.9 and 26.2.5.18 corresponding to ssh from 3.0.1 until 5.5.1, 5.2.11.6 and 5.1.4.14.
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
* zlib@openssh.com: 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 until OTP 28.4.1, 27.3.4.9 and 26.2.5.18 corresponding to ssh from 3.0.1 until 5.5.1, 5.2.11.6 and 5.1.4.14.
Vendor
-
Product
-
CWE
Yayın Tarihi
2026-03-13 19:54:15
Güncelleme
2026-04-06 17:17:08
Source Identifier
6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db
KEV Date Added
-
Kategoriler
Referanslar
https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-23943.html
https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/0c1c04b191f6ab940e8fcfabce39eb5a8a6440a4
https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/43a87b949bdff12d629a8c34146711d9da93b1b1
https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/93073c3bd338c60cd2bae715ce6a1d4ffc1a8fd3
https://github.com/erlang/otp/security/advisories/GHSA-c836-qprm-jw9r
https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-23943
https://www.erlang.org/doc/system/versions.html#order-of-versions