CVE-2026-59251— Denial of service via exponential certificate policy tree growth in path validation
Quick assessment
Affected
Erlang OTP
Exploitation
No confirmed in-the-wild exploitation; assess based on exposure
Recommended action
Check the vendor advisory and references for a fixed version. If immediate upgrade is impossible, restrict exposure and increase monitoring.
Erlang OTP是瑞典Erlang社区的一套构建分布式系统的中间件平台。 Erlang OTP 26.2版本至29.0.4之前版本、28.5.0.4版本和27.3.4.15版本存在资源管理错误漏洞，该漏洞源于public_key证书路径验证中的资源无限制分配，导致pubkey_policy_tree无限增长，可能被远程未认证攻击者利用发送特制X.509证书链造成拒绝服务。
Possible ATT&CK Techniques 1 AI
T1496 · Resource Hijacking
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I. Basic Information for CVE-2026-59251
Vulnerability Information
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Vulnerability Title
Denial of service via exponential certificate policy tree growth in path validation
Source: CVE Program / CVE List V5
Vulnerability Description
Allocation of resources without limits in Erlang/OTP public_key certificate path validation allows a remote unauthenticated attacker to cause denial of service by sending a crafted X.509 certificate chain during the TLS handshake.
During RFC 5280 policy processing in public_key:pkix_path_validation/3, the certificate policy tree maintained by pubkey_policy_tree grows without an upper bound. When a certificate chain contains M policies per certificate and K certificates, the tree grows on the order of M^K nodes because pubkey_policy_tree:add_leaves/2 and pubkey_policy_tree:add_leaf_siblings/2 extend the tree per policy per certificate. A modest chain with many policies per certificate is enough to pin BEAM schedulers and exhaust the node's memory, taking down the entire VM. The attacker only needs to be able to present a certificate chain to the victim, which is the normal precondition for a TLS handshake, so exploitation succeeds against any incoming or outgoing TLS connection that validates the peer's chain (the default for SSL/TLS clients and mutual-TLS servers).
This is the same vulnerability class as OpenSSL's X509_verify_cert policy tree DoS.
This vulnerability is associated with program files lib/public_key/src/pubkey_policy_tree.erl and program routines pubkey_policy_tree:add_leaves/2 and pubkey_policy_tree:add_leaf_siblings/2.
This issue affects OTP from OTP 26.2 before OTP 29.0.4, OTP 28.5.0.4 and OTP 27.3.4.15, corresponding to public_key from 1.15 before 1.21.4, 1.20.3.4 and 1.17.1.5.
Source: CVE Program / CVE List V5
CVSS Information
CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:L
Source: CVE Program / CVE List V5
Vulnerability Type
不加限制或调节的资源分配
Source: CVE Program / CVE List V5
Vulnerability Title
Erlang OTP 资源管理错误漏洞
Source: CNNVD (China National Vulnerability Database)
Vulnerability Description
Erlang OTP是瑞典Erlang社区的一套构建分布式系统的中间件平台。 Erlang OTP 26.2版本至29.0.4之前版本、28.5.0.4版本和27.3.4.15版本存在资源管理错误漏洞，该漏洞源于public_key证书路径验证中的资源无限制分配，导致pubkey_policy_tree无限增长，可能被远程未认证攻击者利用发送特制X.509证书链造成拒绝服务。
Source: CNNVD (China National Vulnerability Database)
CVSS Information
N/A
Source: CNNVD (China National Vulnerability Database)
Vulnerability Type
N/A
Source: CNNVD (China National Vulnerability Database)
Affected Products
II. Public POCs for CVE-2026-59251
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Patches & Fixes for CVE-2026-59251 (2)
Vendor Advisories for CVE-2026-59251 (3)
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🔗 EEF-CVE-2026-59251 - OSV related
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Same Patch Batch · Erlang · 2026-07-27 · 8 CVEs total
| CVE-2026-55953 | 9.1 CRITICAL | TLS 1.2 and DTLS client accepts unoffered anonymous cipher suite, bypassing server authent |
| CVE-2026-58227 | 8.7 HIGH | TLS/DTLS denial of service via unbounded recursion on cross-signed peer certificate chain |
| CVE-2026-59250 | 8.3 HIGH | Megaco flex scanner buffer overflow via oversized property parm name |
| CVE-2026-54890 | 8.2 HIGH | BEAM VM crash via integer underflow in binary_to_term BIT_BINARY_EXT decoding |
| CVE-2026-42792 | 6.3 MEDIUM | epmd permanent DoS via EMFILE on accept(2) in erts |
| CVE-2026-55737 | 5.1 MEDIUM | Heap pointer corruption via signed/unsigned mismatch in LARGE_TUPLE_EXT decoding in erts e |
| CVE-2026-47078 | 4.8 MEDIUM | Relative path traversal in zip:unzip/zip:extract via check_dir_level depth-counter bypass |
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