CVE-2026-59251

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 publickey:pkixpathvalidation/3, the certificate policy tree maintained by pubkeypolicytree 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 pubkeypolicytree:addleaves/2 and pubkeypolicytree:addleafsiblings/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 X509verifycert policy tree DoS.

This vulnerability is associated with program files lib/publickey/src/pubkeypolicytree.erl and program routines pubkeypolicytree:addleaves/2 and pubkeypolicytree:addleafsiblings/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.

Database specific

{
    "unresolved_ranges": [
        {
            "extracted_events": [
                {
                    "introduced": "1.15"
                },
                {
                    "fixed": "*"
                },
                {
                    "introduced": "26.2"
                },
                {
                    "fixed": "*"
                },
                {
                    "introduced": "9d1dda7bad5a64b58c10a1554751689e94131a73"
                },
                {
                    "fixed": "*"
                }
            ],
            "source": "AFFECTED_FIELD"
        }
    ],
    "cna_assigner": "EEF",
    "osv_generated_from": "https://github.com/CVEProject/cvelistV5/tree/main/cves/2026/59xxx/CVE-2026-59251.json",
    "cwe_ids": [
        "CWE-770"
    ]
}

References

Affected packages

Git / github.com/erlang/otp

Affected ranges

Type

GIT

Repo

https://github.com/erlang/otp

Events

Introduced

7fc0898502cb3370b7c6d523a7393cd101808493

Fixed

8def54e66dfdd41c535272794d49cc633f596d22

Introduced

9e6f6742c4d9e9915ee8af0dcb7d97cf1f836116

Fixed

6cfd400a2379163a2802f376d3b3d02f815d34c0

Introduced

550d7b7898706c7822362c42e7b93120c1d1f29a

Fixed

1259612946cb36a8bf9614b289090bb32fbcbeb2

Fixed

f04c6bba38de1cf1b1836a7d9a9fbe239bd939e8

Fixed

f8580fc117098c08165f46c26fd0750c5cfb2a90

Database specific

Show details

{
    "extracted_events": [
        {
            "introduced": "26.2"
        },
        {
            "fixed": "27.3.4.15"
        },
        {
            "introduced": "28.0"
        },
        {
            "fixed": "28.5.0.4"
        },
        {
            "introduced": "29.0"
        },
        {
            "fixed": "29.0.4"
        }
    ],
    "source": [
        "CPE_RANGE",
        "REFERENCES"
    ],
    "cpe": "cpe:2.3:a:erlang:erlang\\/otp:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*"
}

Affected versions

OTP-28.*

OTP-28.0

OTP-28.1

OTP-28.4

OTP-28.5

OTP-28.5.0.1

OTP-28.5.0.2

OTP-28.5.0.3

OTP-29.*

OTP-29.0

OTP-29.0.1

OTP-29.0.2

OTP-29.0.3

Other

patch-base-28

Database specific

source

"https://storage.googleapis.com/cve-osv-conversion/osv-output/CVE-2026-59251.json"