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 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.
CVSS
No CVSS.
References
Configurations
No configuration.
History
13 Mar 2026, 19:54
| Type | Values Removed | Values Added |
|---|---|---|
| New CVE |
Information
Published : 2026-03-13 19:54
Updated : 2026-03-16 14:54
NVD link : CVE-2026-23943
Mitre link : CVE-2026-23943
CVE.ORG link : CVE-2026-23943
JSON object : View
Products Affected
No product.
CWE
CWE-409
Improper Handling of Highly Compressed Data (Data Amplification)