NetApp Black Box — ONTAP knowledge base

Home / Security / Advisories / NTAP-20261104-0017

NTAP-20261104-0017 — CVE-2026-54887 Erlang/OTP Vulnerability in NetApp Products

Published 2026-11-04 · Updated 2026-11-04 · Status: Interim · Exploitation: Public · Severity: MEDIUM 4.8 · ONTAP affected: Yes

Official advisory: NTAP-20261104-0017 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: 4.8

CVEs in this advisory

What the CVE records say

CVE-2026-54887 — Use of Default Cryptographic Key vulnerability in Erlang/OTP ssl (DTLS server) allows predictable DTLS cookie computation during the startup window, enabling source address verification bypass. On DTLS server startup, dtls_server_connection:initial_hello/3 initializes previous_cookie_secret to the empty binary (<<>>) instead of a random value. Because HMAC with an empty key is deterministic, anyone who observes the plaintext ClientHello can compute dtls_handshake:cookie(<<>>, IP, Port, Hello) and forge a valid DTLS cookie before the first rotation of the cookie secret. The DTLS cookie (RFC 6347 §4.2.1) is a denial-of-service mitigation that prevents spoofed source IPs from forcing the server to allocate state and perform expensive cryptographic operations; it is not an authentication mechanism. During the window from server startup until the first secret rotation (0 to 15 seconds), an attacker who can observe the plaintext ClientHello can bypass the source address verification, enabling DTLS handshake amplification with spoofed source addresses. This vulnerability is associated with program file lib/ssl/src/dtls_server_connection.erl and program routine dtls_server_connection:initial_hello/3. This issue affects OTP from OTP 20.0 before OTP 29.0.3, OTP 28.5.0.3 and OTP 27.3.4.14, corresponding to ssl from 8.2 before 11.7.3, 11.6.0.3 and 11.2.12.10.

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