CVE-2026-58227

TLS/DTLS denial of service via unbounded recursion on cross-signed peer certificate chain

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.

Affected Versions

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Credits