A essential safety vulnerability has been disclosed within the Erlang/Open Telecom Platform (OTP) SSH implementation that would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code sans any authentication underneath sure circumstances.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-32433, has been given the utmost CVSS rating of 10.0.
“The vulnerability permits an attacker with community entry to an Erlang/OTP SSH server to execute arbitrary code with out prior authentication,” Ruhr College Bochum researchers Fabian Bäumer, Marcus Brinkmann, Marcel Maehren, and Jörg Schwenk mentioned.
The difficulty stems from improper dealing with of SSH protocol messages that primarily allow an attacker to ship connection protocol messages previous to authentication. Profitable exploitation of the shortcomings may lead to arbitrary code execution within the context of the SSH daemon.
Additional exacerbating the chance, if the daemon course of is operating as root, it permits the attacker to have full management of the system, in flip, paving the best way for unauthorized entry to and manipulation of delicate knowledge or denial-of-service (DoS).
All customers operating an SSH server based mostly on the Erlang/OTP SSH library are seemingly affected by CVE-2025-32433. It is really useful to replace to variations OTP-27.3.3, OTP-26.2.5.11, and OTP-25.3.2.20. As momentary workarounds, entry to susceptible SSH servers could be prevented utilizing acceptable firewall guidelines.
In an announcement shared with The Hacker Information, Mayuresh Dani, supervisor of safety analysis at Qualys, described the vulnerability as extraordinarily essential and that it could actually permit a risk actor to carry out actions akin to putting in ransomware or siphoning off delicate knowledge.
“Erlang is ceaselessly discovered put in on high-availability techniques as a result of its strong and concurrent processing help,” Dani mentioned. “A majority of Cisco and Ericsson units run Erlang.”
“Any service utilizing Erlang/OTP’s SSH library for distant entry akin to these utilized in OT/IoT units, edge computing units are inclined to exploitation. Upgrading to the mounted Erlang/OTP or vendor-supported variations will remediate the vulnerability. Ought to organizations want extra time to put in upgrades, they need to prohibit SSH port entry to approved customers alone.”
