Atom Exhaustion Is Not a Footgun. It's One Third of Our CVEs
Atom exhaustion is a significant vulnerability in the BEAM ecosystem, accounting for 35.8% of CVEs published by the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation. This denial-of-service issue arises when atoms are created from user-supplied input, leading to potential crashes of the virtual machine. To mitigate this risk, developers are advised to avoid creating new atoms at runtime and to utilize existing-atom variants or explicit lookup tables instead.
- ▪Atom exhaustion represents a major category of vulnerabilities in the Erlang Ecosystem.
- ▪Creating atoms from user input can lead to denial-of-service attacks if the input is not controlled or finite.
- ▪Developers are encouraged to use linters and existing-atom variants to prevent atom exhaustion vulnerabilities.
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| Original publisher | Erlef |
| Canonical URL | https://erlef.org/blog/security/atom-exhaustion |
| Publication time | Fri, 29 May 2026 00:35:57 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-29T00:59:38.922Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-29T00:59:38.922Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
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| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
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| Cluster | u8B3_oJdcC-s |
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| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Atom Exhaustion Is Not a Footgun. It's One Third of Our CVEs. May 26, 2026 by Jonatan Männchen Posted in Security Tags security atom-exhaustion vulnerability dos 35.8% of CVEs published by the Erlang Ecosystem Foundation CNA fall into the category of uncontrolled resource consumption. In the BEAM ecosystem, a large share of those are caused by one recurring issue: atom exhaustion. You can find the current distribution on the EEF CNA’s Common Weaknesses page. Atom exhaustion is a denial-of-service vulnerability. Atoms are not garbage collected and are stored in a global atom table, and once it fills up, the VM crashes. Creating atoms from non-finite values, especially user-supplied input, is therefore a latent DoS waiting to happen.
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