Vulnerability · Published Sep 22, 2026 · Assigned by EEF
CVE-2026-65634Superlinear CPU denial of service in Erlang/OTP ASN.1 OBJECT IDENTIFIER decoder
High 8.2
In plain English
A high-severity security flaw in OTP from Erlang. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.3% (higher than 19% of all known vulnerabilities). Fixed versions are available - upgrade the affected package.
Official description
Inefficient algorithmic complexity in the Erlang/OTP asn1 OBJECT IDENTIFIER decoder allows a remote unauthenticated attacker to cause denial of service by sending a crafted OID during the TLS handshake. The BER OID decoder asn1rtt_ber:dec_subidentifiers/3 in lib/asn1/src/asn1rtt_ber.erl and the equivalent PER helper asn1rtt_per_common:dec_subidentifiers/3 in lib/asn1/src/asn1rtt_per_common.erl accumulate a base-128 subidentifier into an unbounded integer using (Av bsl 7) + H per continuation byte. Each shift and addition on the growing accumulator is linear in the number of bits already accumulated, giving quadratic total work in the size of a single subidentifier. The JER helper asn1rtt_jer:json2oid/1 in lib/asn1/src/asn1rtt_jer.erl exhibits the same class of unbounded-integer parsing when decoding a dot-separated OID from JSON. A DER-encoded OBJECT IDENTIFIER with one very large arc (approximately 262 KB of continuation bytes) consumes roughly 13 seconds of CPU on typical hardware. The vulnerable decoder is generated into every ASN.1 module that contains an OBJECT IDENTIFIER, including OTP-PUB-KEY which is reached during X.509 certificate parsing via public_key:pkix_decode_cert/2. This decoder runs before any signature or trust chain verification, so any Erlang service that parses peer TLS certificates is exposed: the default for TLS clients (which always parse the server certificate) and for mutual-TLS servers (which parse client certificates). This vulnerability is associated with program files lib/asn1/src/asn1rtt_ber.erl, lib/asn1/src/asn1rtt_per_common.erl and lib/asn1/src/asn1rtt_jer.erl and program routines asn1rtt_ber:dec_subidentifiers/3, asn1rtt_per_common:dec_subidentifiers/3 and asn1rtt_jer:json2oid/1. This issue affects OTP from OTP 17.0 before OTP 27.3.4.18, OTP 28.5.0.7, and OTP 29.1.1, corresponding to asn1 from 3.0 before 5.3.4.3, 5.4.3.1, and 5.5.2. Whether OTP before OTP 17.0, corresponding to asn1 before 3.0, is affected is unknown.
Affected packages & fixed versions
| Ecosystem | Package | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Debian:12 | erlang | no fix listed | DEBIAN-CVE-2026-65634 |
| Debian:13 | erlang | 1:27.3.4.1+dfsg-1+deb13u4 | DEBIAN-CVE-2026-65634 |
| Debian:14 | erlang | 1:29.1.1+dfsg-1 | DEBIAN-CVE-2026-65634 |
| Ubuntu:22.04:LTS | erlang | 1:24.2.1+dfsg-1ubuntu0.8 | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-65634 |
| Ubuntu:22.04:LTS | erlang | 1:24.2.1+dfsg-1ubuntu0.8 | USN-8901-1 |
| Ubuntu:24.04:LTS | erlang | 1:25.3.2.8+dfsg-1ubuntu4.8 | USN-8901-1 |
| Ubuntu:24.04:LTS | erlang | 1:25.3.2.8+dfsg-1ubuntu4.8 | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-65634 |
| Ubuntu:26.04:LTS | erlang | 1:27.3.4.6+dfsg-1ubuntu0.2 | USN-8901-1 |
| Ubuntu:26.04:LTS | erlang | 1:27.3.4.6+dfsg-1ubuntu0.2 | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-65634 |
| Ubuntu:26.10 | erlang | no fix listed | UBUNTU-CVE-2026-65634 |
Affected products (as reported)
Weakness: CWE-407 · Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:P/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
References
- GitHub Advisory related, vendor-advisory
- EEF CNA record for CVE-2026-65634 related
- OSV record EEF-CVE-2026-65634 related
- Erlang/OTP version ordering x_version-scheme
- Fix commit 0fe2c02 in erlang/otp patch