CVE-2026-68956: SSH daemon allocates unbounded idle session channels, bypassing max_channels

Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling vulnerability in Erlang/OTP ssh allows an authenticated remote attacker to exhaust node memory by repeatedly opening session channels that are never assigned a handler.

The "session" clause of sshconnection:handlemsg/4 checks only minimalremotemaxpacketsize before calling setupsession/5, which unconditionally builds a #channel{} record and stores it in the ETS channel cache. The maxchannels daemon option is consulted only by sshchannelsup:maxnumchannelsnotexceeded/2, which counts supervisor children, so a channel that never gets a shell, exec, or subsystem handler is invisible to the limit and setting the option to a finite value does not mitigate the attack. RFC 4254 section 5.1 permits many session channels per connection, and each record costs only a few hundred bytes, so a single authenticated connection can accumulate channels until the node runs out of memory and the emulator terminates, affecting every application on it. No file contents, credentials, or write access are obtainable.

This issue affects OTP from OTP 17.0 before OTP 27.3.4.18, OTP 28.5.0.7, and OTP 29.1.1, corresponding to ssh from 3.0.1 before 5.2.11.13, 5.5.2.6, and 6.0.6. Whether OTP before OTP 17.0, corresponding to ssh before 3.0.1, is affected is unknown.