CVE-2026-23943

NameCVE-2026-23943
DescriptionImproper 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.
SourceCVE (at NVD; CERT, ENISA, LWN, oss-sec, fulldisc, Debian ELTS, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Gentoo, SUSE bugzilla/CVE, GitHub advisories/code/issues, web search, more)
Debian Bugs1130912

Vulnerable and fixed packages

The table below lists information on source packages.

Source PackageReleaseVersionStatus
erlang (PTS)bullseye1:23.2.6+dfsg-1+deb11u1vulnerable
bullseye (security)1:23.2.6+dfsg-1+deb11u3vulnerable
bookworm1:25.2.3+dfsg-1+deb12u3vulnerable
bookworm (security)1:25.2.3+dfsg-1+deb12u1vulnerable
trixie1:27.3.4.1+dfsg-1+deb13u1vulnerable
forky, sid1:27.3.4.8+dfsg-1vulnerable

The information below is based on the following data on fixed versions.

PackageTypeReleaseFixed VersionUrgencyOriginDebian Bugs
erlangsource(unstable)(unfixed)1130912

Notes

https://github.com/erlang/otp/security/advisories/GHSA-c836-qprm-jw9r
Fixed by: https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/43a87b949bdff12d629a8c34146711d9da93b1b1 (OTP-28.4.1)
Fixed by: https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/93073c3bd338c60cd2bae715ce6a1d4ffc1a8fd3 (OTP-27.3.4.9)
Fixed by: https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/0c1c04b191f6ab940e8fcfabce39eb5a8a6440a4 (OTP-26.2.5.18)

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