CVE-2026-54891: Improper Enforcement of Message Integrity During Transmission in a Communication Channel

Improper Enforcement of Message Integrity During Transmission in a Communication Channel vulnerability in Erlang/OTP ssl (tls_gen_connection module) allows a network-positioned attacker to inject unauthenticated plaintext that the TLS client application later treats as authenticated server data.

The function tls_gen_connection:handle_protocol_record/3 rejects APPLICATION_DATA records that arrive in pre-handshake states when the TLS endpoint acts as a server, but does not apply the same check when the endpoint acts as a client. A network-positioned attacker can send plaintext APPLICATION_DATA records to the client during the handshake. The records are buffered and, once the handshake completes successfully, delivered to the application as if they were authenticated post-handshake data. The attacker cannot observe the client's response or steer the connection, so the impact is limited to blind injection of unauthenticated bytes. The injection window is wider for TLS versions prior to TLS 1.3 than for TLS 1.3.

This vulnerability is associated with program file lib/ssl/src/tls_gen_connection.erl.

TLS 1.3 is affected starting with OTP 22.0, when TLS 1.3 support was added.

This issue affects OTP from OTP 17.0 before OTP 27.3.4.14, from OTP 28.0 before OTP 28.5.0.3, and from OTP 29.0 before OTP 29.0.3, corresponding to ssl from 5.3.4 before 11.2.12.10, from 11.3 before 11.6.0.3, and from 11.7 before 11.7.3. Whether OTP before OTP 17.0, corresponding to ssl before 5.3.4, is affected is unknown.