VulnerabilityModified

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.

MEDIUM 6.9EPSS 0.64%

Does this matter?

Lower severity and a low EPSS score (0.64%). Track it; it rarely justifies an emergency change on its own.

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 * 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 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.

CVSS 4.0: 6.9 MEDIUMCVSS: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/M
EPSS: 0.64% probability · 49th percentile
CISA KEV: Not listed
Weakness: CWE-409
Affected: erlang/erlang\/otp · erlang/erlang\/ssh
Source: 6b3ad84c-e1a6-4bf7-a703-f496b71e49db

References

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA. Refreshed daily.