Erlang OTP epmd DoS via FD exhaustion (before 27.3.4.15)
CVE-2026-42792 Published on July 27, 2026

epmd permanent DoS via EMFILE on accept(2) in erts
Improper Handling of Exceptional Conditions vulnerability in Erlang OTP erts (epmd) allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to permanently terminate the Erlang Port Mapper Daemon (epmd) via connection slot exhaustion. The do_accept function in erts/epmd/src/epmd_srv.c calls epmd_cleanup_exit() when accept(2) returns EMFILE (per-process file descriptor limit reached) or ENFILE (system-wide file descriptor limit reached), rather than treating these as recoverable conditions. An attacker can exhaust epmd's file descriptor slots by holding many TCP connections open while periodically sending a single byte to reset the idle timeout, then causing accept(2) to return EMFILE, which kills the daemon. epmd has no per-source-IP connection cap, making the attack feasible from a single source. On Debian/Ubuntu default packaging the impact is amplified: the systemd unit inherits a low file descriptor soft limit, and repeated daemon deaths trigger systemd's start-rate-limit, permanently failing both epmd.service and epmd.socket and requiring manual operator intervention to recover. This issue affects OTP from OTP 17.0 before OTP 29.0.4, OTP 28.5.0.4 and OTP 27.3.4.15.

Vendor Advisory NVD

Weakness Types

Improper Handling of Exceptional Conditions

The software does not handle or incorrectly handles an exceptional condition.

Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling

The software allocates a reusable resource or group of resources on behalf of an actor without imposing any restrictions on the size or number of resources that can be allocated, in violation of the intended security policy for that actor.


Products Associated with CVE-2026-42792

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Affected Versions

Erlang OTP: Erlang OTP: