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CVE-2026-23943
Erlang OTP SSH Compression Bomb DoS
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 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.

INFO

Published Date :

March 13, 2026, 10:23 a.m.

Last Modified :

March 13, 2026, 10:23 a.m.

Remotely Exploit :

No

Source :

None
Affected Products

The following products are affected by CVE-2026-23943 vulnerability. Even if cvefeed.io is aware of the exact versions of the products that are affected, the information is not represented in the table below.

No affected product recoded yet

: Total Affected Vendor : 0 | Products : 0
Solution
Update Erlang OTP to patch against denial-of-service vulnerability.
  • Update Erlang OTP to a patched version.
  • Disable zlib compression if updating is not possible.
  • Configure SSH to limit compressed payload sizes.
References to Advisories, Solutions, and Tools

Here, you will find a curated list of external links that provide in-depth information, practical solutions, and valuable tools related to CVE-2026-23943.

URL Resource
https://github.com/erlang/otp/security/advisories/GHSA-c836-qprm-jw9r vendor-advisory
https://www.erlang.org/doc/system/versions.html#order-of-versions x_version-scheme
https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/43a87b949bdff12d629a8c34146711d9da93b1b1 patch
https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/93073c3bd338c60cd2bae715ce6a1d4ffc1a8fd3 patch
https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/0c1c04b191f6ab940e8fcfabce39eb5a8a6440a4 patch
CWE - Common Weakness Enumeration

While CVE identifies specific instances of vulnerabilities, CWE categorizes the common flaws or weaknesses that can lead to vulnerabilities. CVE-2026-23943 is associated with the following CWEs:

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC) stores attack patterns, which are descriptions of the common attributes and approaches employed by adversaries to exploit the CVE-2026-23943 weaknesses.

We scan GitHub repositories to detect new proof-of-concept exploits. Following list is a collection of public exploits and proof-of-concepts, which have been published on GitHub (sorted by the most recently updated).

Results are limited to the first 15 repositories due to potential performance issues.

The following list is the news that have been mention CVE-2026-23943 vulnerability anywhere in the article.

Results are limited to the first 20 news articles due to potential performance issues.

EPSS is a daily estimate of the probability of exploitation activity being observed over the next 30 days. Following chart shows the EPSS score history of the vulnerability.
Vulnerability Scoring Details
No CVSS metrics available for this vulnerability.