High [CVE-2026-54890] Denial of Service via integer underflow in ETF decoding
This high-severity Red Hat Linux advisory covers CVE-2026-54890 affecting Red Hat Hardened Images.
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Summary
Integer Underflow (Wrap or Wraparound) vulnerability in erlang otp erlang/otp (erts modules), erlang otp erts (erts modules) allows Forced Integer Overflow, Excessive Allocation. This vulnerability is associated with program files erts/emulator/beam/external.c, emulator/beam/external.c.
The BIT_BINARY_EXT tag (77) handler in the External Term Format (ETF) decoder accepts an encoding with both length and trailing-bits fields set to zero. The subsequent computation of the bitstring size underflows an unsigned integer, producing a value of roughly 2^64 that is then passed as a memory allocation size.
The allocator aborts the entire node with a message such as "Cannot allocate 2305843009213693951 bytes of memory (of type binary)". The crash is a VM-level abort, not an Erlang-level exception.
It cannot be intercepted by supervision trees, by try/catch, or by passing the [safe] option to binary_to_term/2 (which only restricts atom creation and does not perform structural validation of binary encodings). Any application that decodes ETF from untrusted sources via binary_to_term/1,2 or enif_binary_to_term() is exposed.
The Erlang distribution protocol also decodes incoming terms through the same code path, but distribution is expected to run on trusted networks per the OTP Secure Coding Guidelines (DSG-011).
Affected product named by the advisory: Red Hat Hardened Images.
- < 27.0
- < 29.0.4
- < 28.5.0.4
- < 27.3.4.15
- < 15.0
- < 17.0.4
- < 16.4.0.4
- < 15.2.7.11
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 26 days ago·verify at source
- erlang27-main-27.3.4.15-0.1.hum1
- RHSA-2026:47009
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 26 days ago·verify at source
Mitigation
Upgrade to a fixed release: erlang27-main-27.3.4.15-0.1.hum1, RHSA-2026:47009. That is the remediation for this advisory.
The vendor advisory may list interim mitigations or workarounds not captured here. Review it before change work.
Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 26 days ago·verify at source
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