U.S. flag   An official website of the United States government
Dot gov

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Https

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock (Dot gov) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

CVE-2026-23943 Detail

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.


Metrics

NVD enrichment efforts reference publicly available information to associate vector strings. CVSS information contributed by other sources is also displayed.
CVSS 4.0 Severity and Vector Strings:

NIST CVSS score
NIST: NVD
N/A
NVD assessment not yet provided.

Nist CVSS score does not match with CNA score
CNA:  EEF
CVSS-B 6.9 MEDIUM
Vector:  CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

References to Advisories, Solutions, and Tools

By selecting these links, you will be leaving NIST webspace. We have provided these links to other web sites because they may have information that would be of interest to you. No inferences should be drawn on account of other sites being referenced, or not, from this page. There may be other web sites that are more appropriate for your purpose. NIST does not necessarily endorse the views expressed, or concur with the facts presented on these sites. Further, NIST does not endorse any commercial products that may be mentioned on these sites. Please address comments about this page to [email protected].

URL Source(s) Tag(s)
https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/0c1c04b191f6ab940e8fcfabce39eb5a8a6440a4 EEF
https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/43a87b949bdff12d629a8c34146711d9da93b1b1 EEF
https://github.com/erlang/otp/commit/93073c3bd338c60cd2bae715ce6a1d4ffc1a8fd3 EEF
https://github.com/erlang/otp/security/advisories/GHSA-c836-qprm-jw9r EEF
https://www.erlang.org/doc/system/versions.html#order-of-versions EEF

Weakness Enumeration

CWE-ID CWE Name Source
CWE-409 Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification) EEF  

Change History

1 change records found show changes

Quick Info

CVE Dictionary Entry:
CVE-2026-23943
NVD Published Date:
03/13/2026
NVD Last Modified:
03/13/2026
Source:
EEF