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CVE-2026-54890 is a high-severity integer underflow vulnerability in Erlang/OTP's erts External Term Format (ETF) decoder, specifically in the BIT_BINARY_EXT tag handler in external.c. The vulnerable logic accepts an ETF encoding in which both the bitstring length field and trailing-bits field are zero. A subsequent computation of the bitstring size underflows an unsigned integer, yielding an extremely large size value that is then used for memory allocation. This results in an excessive allocation request on the order of 2^64 and causes the Erlang VM allocator to abort the entire node. The flaw affects applications and components that decode untrusted ETF data through binary_to_term/1, binary_to_term/2, or enif_binary_to_term(). The issue also exists on the Erlang distribution decoding path because it uses the same decoder logic.
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A vulnerability referenced in the PhotonOS PHSA-2026-5.0-92 advisory for the erlang package.
An integer underflow vulnerability in Erlang/OTP's erts ETF decoder that can trigger excessive memory allocation and crash the Erlang VM/node when decoding crafted external term data from untrusted sources.
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