TLS/DTLS denial of service via unbounded recursion on cross-signed peer certificate chain
Get instant alerts when new vulnerabilities affect OTP - before attackers find them.
The Erlang/OTP ssl application does not detect cycles when reconstructing an incomplete peer certificate chain during a TLS or DTLS handshake. In ssl_certificate:handle_incomplete_chain/5, the received chain is passed to ssl_certificate:build_certificate_chain/5, which walks issuer relationships via ssl_certificate:do_certificate_chain/7 with no cycle detection and no depth limit. When the peer supplies two mutually cross-signed certificates in unordered form (A issues B, B issues A), the issuer lookup alternates between the two certificates and the pair of functions recurses indefinitely, growing the call stack and chain accumulator without bound. An unauthenticated remote attacker can send a crafted certificate chain in a TLS or DTLS Certificate handshake message to exhaust available memory and crash the BEAM node. Only a TCP connection and a partial handshake are required; no authentication or completed handshake is needed, and both TLS/DTLS servers and clients are affected when processing peer certificate messages. This issue affects OTP from 23.2 before 27.3.4.15, 28.5.0.4 and 29.0.4 corresponding to ssl from 10.2 before 11.2.12.11, 11.6.0.4 and 11.7.4.
Our own answer: ranges merged, affected separated from platform-only, with confidence and review flags.
No remediation guidance has been written for this CVE yet. What the record does show:
Patch and advisory references
SSVC signals action urgency (what to patch first), separate from CVSS which measures severity.
Get alerted
Track the products you run and VulnTracker tells you when a new CVE affects them — with what is known about fixing it, and nothing about the rest.