A high-severity resource exhaustion vulnerability in the Erlang OTP inets application allows unauthenticated remote attackers to trigger denial-of-service conditions.

This vulnerability is a resource exhaustion flaw (CWE-770) where the inets HTTP server fails to validate body-size limits for chunked requests. An unauthenticated attacker can exploit this by sending specially crafted requests to consume excessive server resources.

The vulnerability carries a CVSS score of 8.7, indicating a high risk of service disruption. Successful exploitation results in denial-of-service, which can lead to significant downtime for applications relying on the Erlang OTP inets server, potentially causing operational outages and loss of business continuity.

Immediate Action: Update your Erlang OTP installation to version 27.3.4.17, 28.5.0.6, 29.0.6, or the corresponding patched inets versions as specified in the vendor advisory.

Proactive Monitoring: Monitor server logs for unusually large chunked HTTP requests or sudden spikes in memory and CPU utilization that correlate with incoming traffic.

Compensating Controls: Implement rate limiting and request size filtering at the Web Application Firewall (WAF) or load balancer level to drop oversized or malformed chunked requests before they reach the application.

Public Exploit Available: No

Given the ease of exploitation and the potential for service disruption, administrators should prioritize patching the Erlang OTP environment. Applying the provided security updates is the most effective way to remediate this vulnerability and ensure the continued stability and availability of your infrastructure.