CVE-2026-75538: Erlang OTP

High severity, CVSS 8.2. EPSS: 0.9% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

An attacker that connects to an open Erlang TCP port that uses the inet driver with {packet,4} mode can use a signed overflow in an incorrect packet length calculation to overflow the receive buffer into the VM allocator area and beyond up to about 2 GB. This would easily trash the allocated block's allocator metadata footer, and the next block, if any, and most likely cause the BEAM VM to crash. Utilizing this with precision enough to achieve Remote Code Execution would be extremely unfeasible. This issue affects OTP from OTP 17.0 before OTP 27.3.4.17, from OTP 28.0 before OTP 28.5.0.6, and from OTP 29.0 before OTP 29.0.6, corresponding to erts from 6.0 before 15.2.7.13, from 16.0 before 16.4.0.6, and from 17.0 before 17.0.6. Whether OTP before OTP 17.0, corresponding to erts before 6.0, is affected is unknown.

Affected products

• Erlang OTP: from 17.0, before 27.3.4.17 (fixed in 27.3.4.17); from 28.0, before 28.5.0.6 (fixed in 28.5.0.6); from 29.0, before 29.0.6 (fixed in 29.0.6); from 6.0, before 15.2.7.13 (fixed in 15.2.7.13); from 16.0, before 16.4.0.6 (fixed in 16.4.0.6); from 17.0, before 17.0.6 (fixed in 17.0.6)

Published 2026-09-01. Last modified 2026-09-08.