FreeBSD VuXML: Documenting security issues in FreeBSD and the FreeBSD Ports Collection

Erlang/OTP -- denial of service via exponential certificate policy tree growth

Affected packages
26.2,4 <= erlang < 28.5.0.4,4
erlang-runtime27 < 27.3.4.15
erlang-runtime28 < 28.5.0.4
erlang-runtime29 < 29.0.4

Details

VuXML ID 445d674f-89e1-11f1-b35c-4c526214c986
Discovery 2026-07-27
Entry 2026-07-27

https://github.com/erlang/otp/security/advisories/GHSA-622p-qfh6-c352 reports:

A remote attacker can trigger a denial of service through TLS certificate handling. By sending a specially crafted certificate chain with multiple certificate policies at each level, the policy tree expands exponentially during validation, growing as M^K nodes (where M is the number of policies per certificate and K is the chain depth). This pins schedulers and exhausts memory without any authentication. Any application using SSL/TLS that validates certificate paths is affected, as are direct calls to public_key:pkix_path_validation/3.

References

CVE Name CVE-2026-59251
URL https://github.com/erlang/otp/security/advisories/GHSA-622p-qfh6-c352