CVE-2026-68956

NameCVE-2026-68956
DescriptionAllocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in Erlang/OTP ssh allows an authenticated remote attacker to exhaust node memory by repeatedly opening session channels that are never assigned a handler. The "session" clause of ssh_connection:handle_msg/4 checks only minimal_remote_max_packet_size before calling setup_session/5, which unconditionally builds a #channel{} record and stores it in the ETS channel cache. The max_channels daemon option is consulted only by ssh_channel_sup:max_num_channels_not_exceeded/2, which counts supervisor children, so a channel that never gets a shell, exec, or subsystem handler is invisible to the limit and setting the option to a finite value does not mitigate the attack. RFC 4254 section 5.1 permits many session channels per connection, and each record costs only a few hundred bytes, so a single authenticated connection can accumulate channels until the node runs out of memory and the emulator terminates, affecting every application on it. No file contents, credentials, or write access are obtainable. This issue affects OTP from OTP 18.1.2 before OTP 27.3.4.18, OTP 28.5.0.7, and OTP 29.1.1, corresponding to ssh from 4.1.1 before 5.2.11.13, 5.5.2.6, and 6.0.6. Whether OTP before OTP 18.1.2, corresponding to ssh before 4.1.1, is affected is unknown.
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)

Vulnerable and fixed packages

The table below lists information on source packages.

Source PackageReleaseVersionStatus
erlang (PTS)bookworm1:25.2.3+dfsg-1+deb12u4vulnerable
bookworm (security)1:25.2.3+dfsg-1+deb12u1vulnerable
trixie (security), trixie1:27.3.4.1+dfsg-1+deb13u3vulnerable
forky, sid1:29.1.1+dfsg-1fixed

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

PackageTypeReleaseFixed VersionUrgencyOriginDebian Bugs
erlangsource(unstable)1:29.1.1+dfsg-1

Notes

https://github.com/erlang/otp/security/advisories/GHSA-qhcm-px9c-rvfh
https://cna.erlef.org/cves/CVE-2026-68956.html
https://osv.dev/vulnerability/EEF-CVE-2026-68956
Introduced by: https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/84df3d4d0278e21a36a453bfee94799f0df67c2a (OTP-18.1.2)
Fixed by: https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/79c2d2be17d902c5f53969b5806b725efda831be (OTP-29.1.1)
Fixed by: https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/e18100975f0e5a8d59d02de00df12247a91b443b (OTP-28.5.0.7)
Fixed by: https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/e2bbad0107bba41491a4d549686fd023db8740da (OTP-27.3.4.18)

Search for package or bug name: Reporting problems