CVE-2026-54890: Integer Underflow (Wrap or Wraparound) vulnerability in erlang otp erlang/otp (erts modules), erlang otp erts (erts modules) allows Forced Integer Overflow…

PriorityP343high7.5CVSS 3.1

AVNACLPRNUINSUCNINAH

EPSS

0.42%

35.2th percentile

Integer Underflow (Wrap or Wraparound) vulnerability in erlang otp erlang/otp (erts modules), erlang otp erts (erts modules) allows Forced Integer Overflow, Excessive Allocation. This vulnerability is associated with program files erts/emulator/beam/external.c, emulator/beam/external.c. The BIT_BINARY_EXT tag (77) handler in the External Term Format (ETF) decoder accepts an encoding with both length and trailing-bits fields set to zero. The subsequent computation of the bitstring size underflows an unsigned integer, producing a value of roughly 2^64 that is then passed as a memory allocation size. The allocator aborts the entire node with a message such as "Cannot allocate 2305843009213693951 bytes of memory (of type binary)". The crash is a VM-level abort, not an Erlang-level exception. It cannot be intercepted by supervision trees, by try/catch, or by passing the [safe] option to binary_to_term/2 (which only restricts atom creation and does not perform structural validation of binary encodings). Any application that decodes ETF from untrusted sources via binary_to_term/1,2 or enif_binary_to_term() is exposed. The Erlang distribution protocol also decodes incoming terms through the same code path, but distribution is expected to run on trusted networks per the OTP Secure Coding Guidelines (DSG-011). This issue affects OTP from OTP 27.0 before OTP 29.0.4, OTP 28.5.0.4 and OTP 27.3.4.15, corresponding to erts from 15.0 before 17.0.4, 16.4.0.4 and 15.2.7.11.

Affected

9 ranges

Vendor	Product	Version range	Fixed in
erlang	erlang_otp	>= 27.0 < 27.3.4.15	27.3.4.15
erlang	erlang_otp	>= 28.0 < 28.5.0.4	28.5.0.4
erlang	erlang_otp	>= 29.0 < 29.0.4	29.0.4
erlang	erts	>= 15.0 < 15.2.7.11	15.2.7.11
erlang	erts	>= 16.0 < 16.4.0.4	16.4.0.4
erlang	erts	>= 17.0 < 17.0.4	17.0.4
erlang	otp	>= 15.0 < *	*
erlang	otp	>= 24ef4cbaeda9b9c26682cba75f2f15b0c58722aa < dc1bf9344c0ce62717cf60866590cea0242780fd	dc1bf9344c0ce62717cf60866590cea0242780fd
erlang	otp	>= 27.0 < *	*

CVSS provenance

nvdv3.17.5HIGHCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

nvdv4.08.2HIGHCVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/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/MVI:X/MVA:X/MSC:X/MSI:X/MSA:X/S:X/AU:X/R:X/V:X/RE:X/U:X

vendor_redhat8.2HIGH

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