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NTAP-20261009-0016 — CVE-2026-59251 Erlang/OTP Vulnerability in NetApp Products

Published 2026-10-09 · Updated 2026-10-09 · Status: Interim · Exploitation: Public · Severity: HIGH 7.5 · ONTAP affected: Yes

Official advisory: NTAP-20261009-0016 on security.netapp.com ↗. Affected versions, fixed releases, and workarounds live there — this page is a summary.

Product family: ONTAP · SnapCenter  |  ONTAP-relevant  |  highest CVSS: 7.5

CVEs in this advisory

What the CVE records say

CVE-2026-59251 — Allocation of resources without limits in Erlang/OTP public_key certificate path validation allows a remote unauthenticated attacker to cause denial of service by sending a crafted X.509 certificate chain during the TLS handshake. During RFC 5280 policy processing in public_key:pkix_path_validation/3, the certificate policy tree maintained by pubkey_policy_tree grows without an upper bound. When a certificate chain contains M policies per certificate and K certificates, the tree grows on the order of M^K nodes because pubkey_policy_tree:add_leaves/2 and pubkey_policy_tree:add_leaf_siblings/2 extend the tree per policy per certificate. A modest chain with many policies per certificate is enough to pin BEAM schedulers and exhaust the node's memory, taking down the entire VM. The attacker only needs to be able to present a certificate chain to the victim, which is the normal precondition for a TLS handshake, so exploitation succeeds against any incoming or outgoing TLS connection that validates the peer's chain (the default for SSL/TLS clients and mutual-TLS servers). This is the same vulnerability class as OpenSSL's X509_verify_cert policy tree DoS. This vulnerability is associated with program files lib/public_key/src/pubkey_policy_tree.erl and program routines pubkey_policy_tree:add_leaves/2 and pubkey_policy_tree:add_leaf_siblings/2. This issue affects OTP from OTP 26.2 before OTP 29.0.4, OTP 28.5.0.4 and OTP 27.3.4.15, corresponding to public_key from 1.15 before 1.21.4, 1.20.3.4 and 1.17.1.5.

Impact

Successful exploitation of this vulnerability could lead to Denial of Service (DoS).

Affected products

References

What to do

  1. Check the affected products listed above against the official advisory's affected-versions table — that is where the exact ONTAP 9 release, ONTAP tool, or management product versions are named.
  2. If affected and a fixed release exists, plan the upgrade — see the ONTAP upgrade runbook.
  3. If exploitation is listed as "active", treat remediation as urgent and review exposure (management LIFs, ONTAP S3, SnapMirror endpoints).
  4. Harden in parallel: security hardening baseline and ransomware protection on ONTAP.

Related reading

Browse all ONTAP CVEs → · Security hub