Zephyr's dynamic kernel-object disposal path unrefcheck() in kernel/userspace/userspace.c frees an object's storage (kfree(dyn->data)) once its reference count reaches zero, after running a per-object-type cleanup. The cleanup switch handled only KOBJMSGQ and KOBJSTACK; there was no KOBJTIMER case. A dynamically-allocated, initialized, and armed ktimer keeps its embedded struct timeout dnode linked in the global timeout queue (timeoutq), so freeing the timer storage without cancelling the timeout leaves a dangling node in that queue.
When the timer next expires, the timeout machinery walks timeoutq and invokes ztimerexpirationhandler() on the freed node, dereferencing and writing freed (and reusable) kernel heap in kernel/ISR context. This is a deterministic use-after-free that does not depend on SMP: the queued node is simply never unlinked at free time.
The disposal is reachable from an unprivileged user thread under CONFIGUSERSPACE + CONFIGDYNAMICOBJECTS: a thread that holds the last permission on such a timer drops it via the kobjectrelease() syscall (or by exiting, through kthreadpermsallclear()), and can arm the timer itself via the ktimerstart() syscall. The free and the expiration handler run at kernel privilege while the actor is a user thread, so the bug is a sandbox-escape memory-corruption primitive usable for privilege escalation. The fix adds ktimercleanup() (cancel the timeout and wait for any in-flight handler) and calls it for KOBJTIMER before freeing.
Zephyr's IPv6 forwarding path re-sent routed unicast packets without ever decrementing the IPv6 hop limit. Both routing branches of ipv6routepacket() (subsys/net/ip) were affected: the explicit-route path (netroutepacket()) and the on-link cross-interface path (netroutepacketif()). Each set the packet forwarding flag and called netsenddata() with the hop limit untouched and no expiry check.
Per RFC 8200 the hop-limit decrement is the mechanism that bounds packet lifetime and terminates routing loops; without it, a device acting as an IPv6 router relays looping packets indefinitely. An on-path attacker who can induce or exploit a transient L3 loop turns it into a permanent forwarding storm, causing CPU/bandwidth resource exhaustion (availability DoS) on the forwarder and adjacent links; path-discovery and loop diagnostics that rely on hop-limit expiry are also defeated.
Affected configurations. In every affected release the forwarding path is reached via CONFIGNETROUTE (enabled by default when CONFIGNETIPV6NBRCACHE is set), together with CONFIGNETROUTING for cross-interface routing. Note that CONFIGNETIPV6FORWARDING and CONFIGNETIPV4FORWARDING — which appear in the fix and in this advisory's evidence notes — were introduced after v4.4.0, when the routing options were split and renamed; they do not exist in any affected release. When auditing a v4.4.1-or-earlier configuration, look for CONFIGNETROUTE and CONFIGNETROUTING.
IPv4 is not affected in any release. The IPv4 forwarding path (netrouteipv4packet() in routeipv4.c) was added after v4.4.0 and has never shipped in a release. Its TTL decrement and IPv4 header-checksum recomputation landed on main as part of the same fix, so the evidence notes below discuss it, but no released version is reachable by way of IPv4.
Affected releases are v1.8.0 through v4.4.1: v1.8.0 introduced netroutepacket() and v2.2.0 added netroutepacketif(), and neither decremented the hop limit. v4.3.1 carries the explicit-route fix but not the on-link one, so it is affected as well. Fixed on main by 7d8f1afa7345 (explicit-route path) and 589eadc74efa (on-link path).
Zephyr's IP socket recvmsg() implementation (subsys/net/lib/sockets/socketsinet.c, insertpktinfo()) validated the user-supplied ancillary (msgcontrol) buffer using only the payload length (msg->msgcontrollen < pktinfolen) before writing a full control message consisting of an aligned cmsg header plus the payload. Because the check omitted the cmsg header size, a control buffer whose length falls in the under-checked window (e.g. 16-27 bytes for IPv4 IPPKTINFO on a 64-bit target, where a single element actually occupies 28 bytes) passes the guard yet causes a fixed-size out-of-bounds write of up to one cmsg header (~12 bytes) past the end of the buffer.
Under CONFIGUSERSPACE the recvmsg verifier allocates a kernel-heap copy of the control buffer sized to msgcontrollen and runs the implementation against it, so the overflow corrupts kernel heap memory and is triggerable from an unprivileged userspace thread; in supervisor mode it corrupts the caller's buffer.
The path is reachable on a UDP/IP socket with IPPKTINFO/IPV6RECVPKTINFO (or hoplimit/timestamping) enabled when the application calls recvmsg() with an undersized control buffer and a datagram is received; part of the overwritten bytes (the destination IP in ipiaddr) is influenced by the received packet.
The fix makes the capacity check use NETCMSGSPACE(pktinfolen) (aligned header + aligned data) and returns -ENOMEM when the buffer is too small. Affected: v3.6.0 through v4.4.0.
Zephyr's native TCP stack iterates the global connection list in nettcpforeach() (subsys/net/ip/tcp.c) using the SYSSLISTFOREACHCONTAINERSAFE macro, which caches a pointer to the next list node. Prior to this fix the function released tcplock while invoking the per-connection callback and re-acquired it afterwards.
During that window a concurrent tcpconnrelease(), running on the dedicated TCP work-queue thread when a connection's reference count drops to zero (e.g. a remote peer closing or resetting the connection), can remove and kmemslabfree() the cached next connection. When the iterator advances it dereferences the freed (and possibly reallocated) slab memory — a use-after-free that can crash the system (denial of service) and, if the slot has been reused, cause the callback to operate on an attacker-influenced object (potential information disclosure or further fault).
nettcpforeach() is reached in production via the net conn network shell command and via nettcpcloseallforiface() on interface-down; the freeing side is driven by ordinary TCP traffic.
The fix moves the connection/context teardown in tcpconnrelease() inside the tcplock critical section and keeps tcplock held across the callback in nettcpforeach(). The defect was introduced with the modern (TCP2) stack in 2020 and affects releases up to and including v4.4.0.
In Zephyr's native IPv4 stack, icmpv4handleechorequest() in subsys/net/ip/icmpv4.c builds an echo-reply packet (reply), hands it to nettrysenddata(), and then, on success, calls netstatsupdateicmpsent(netpktiface(reply)). nettrysenddata() transfers ownership of reply to the TX path (netiftryqueuetx -> netiftx -> L2/driver send, or the asynchronous netiftxthread), which can unref it to refcount 0 and return the struct netpkt to its slab (netpktunref -> kmemslabfree) before the stats line runs. netcore.c documents this exact contract ('the pkt might contain garbage already ... do not use pkt after that call').
The post-send netpktiface(reply) therefore reads reply->iface out of a freed (and possibly already reallocated) netpkt, a use-after-free read; with CONFIGNETSTATISTICSPERINTERFACE the stats macro additionally increments a counter through that value, i.e. a dereference/write through a stale or recycled-slot pointer.
The path is reached unauthenticated by any remote host that pings the device (neticmpv4input -> neticmpcallipv4handlers -> icmpv4handleechorequest) and is gated on CONFIGNETSTATISTICSICMP. Impact is a probabilistic read of recycled packet memory plus a possible wild-pointer write under a timing race, leading most likely to corrupted interface statistics or a remotely triggerable crash (DoS).
The defect was introduced in 2019 (v1.14) and is present through v4.4.0. The companion change in neticmpv4senderror() is not a use-after-free because it reads netpktiface(orig), the caller-owned received packet, which stays alive across the send. The fix caches the interface pointer from the live received packet before sending and uses it for the post-send stats updates.
The MCTP-over-I2C+GPIO target binding in Zephyr (subsys/pmci/mctp/mctpi2cgpiotarget.c) processes pseudo-register writes from an I2C bus master byte-by-byte in mctpi2cgpiotargetwritereceived() without validating the order or the receive buffer. In the affected versions the MCTPI2CGPIORXMSGADDR (data) handler dereferences and writes through b->rxpkt without checking that the receive buffer was allocated: a controller that selects the data register and writes a byte without first sending the length register (which is what allocates the buffer) causes a write of an attacker-chosen byte through a NULL/unallocated mctppktbuf pointer (i.e. into a small attacker-advanceable offset above address 0), producing memory corruption or a hard fault.
The same handler also performs a write-then-check bounds test, allowing a one-byte heap overflow at data[255] when more than 255 data bytes are sent.
Because the I2C target callback is invoked with raw bytes supplied by whatever device is the bus master and the binding performs no authentication, a malicious or malfunctioning controller on the bus can trigger these without any prior protocol state, leading to memory corruption and/or denial of service on the target device.
The vulnerable code was introduced when the I2C+GPIO target binding was added and shipped in Zephyr v4.3.0 and v4.4.0. The fix defers allocation to the first data byte with a NULL check, treats a missing length as a zero-sized packet rejected by libmctp, and moves the bounds check before the store.
A bitwise shift vulnerability in Zephyr's PTP subsystem allows a remote attacker to cause undefined behavior and potential system crashes. An attacker sends a crafted PTPMSGMANAGEMENT message to set an unvalidated negative logannounceinterval value in the port's data set. When a subsequent PTPMSGANNOUNCE message is processed, porttimersettimeoutrandom computes a timeout as NSECPERSEC >> -logseconds; if the attacker-supplied value is sufficiently negative (e.g., -127), the shift amount exceeds the 64-bit integer width, triggering undefined behavior in C. This can cause a system crash via a compiler-generated illegal instruction trap on some architectures, or produce an erroneous zero timeout leading to resource starvation loops or other logical errors.
parseipv4() in subsys/net/ip/utils.c (reached via netipaddrparse() for strings of the form "a.b.c.d:port") copies the port substring into a fixed 17-byte stack buffer (char ipaddr[NETIPV4ADDRLEN + 1]) using a length of strlen - end - 1, where strlen is the full, unbounded input length and end is only the (<=15-byte) offset of the ':' delimiter. Because the destination size is never consulted, a crafted address string with a long suffix after the colon (e.g. "1.2.3.4:" followed by hundreds of bytes) causes an out-of-bounds stack write whose length and contents are fully attacker-controlled (memcpy of the suffix plus a trailing NUL), enabling memory corruption and at minimum a denial of service, and potentially control-flow hijack. The parser is reached from the standard socket API (zsockgetaddrinfo / literal-address resolution), DNS server-string configuration, and the eswifi Wi-Fi co-processor DNS-response path, so an application that resolves a network-influenced address string is exposed. The bug was introduced when the parser was added (Zephyr v1.9.0) and shipped in all releases through v4.4.0. The fix removes the unbounded copy and validates the port length before copying into a small dedicated buffer. Note: the equivalent IPv6 "[addr]:port" path in parseipv6() retains the same unbounded copy at this commit and remains a separate, still-reachable instance of the defect.
Zephyr's dynamic kernel-object tracking (kernel/userspace/userspace.c, formerly kernel/userspace.c) maintains a doubly-linked list (objlist) of dynamically allocated kernel objects. Iteration over this list in kobjectwordlistforeach() was performed under listslock using the SAFE iterator (which caches the next node), but list removal and freeing of nodes was performed under different, disjoint spinlocks: objfreelock in kobjectfree() and objlock in unrefcheck(). On an SMP system, while one CPU iterated objlist under listslock, another CPU could unlink and kfree() the dynobj node that the iterator had cached as its next pointer, causing the iterator to dereference freed kernel memory (use-after-free / dangling list traversal). All of the racing operations are reachable from unprivileged user-mode threads via system calls: kobjectalloc/kobjectallocsize and kobjectrelease drive removals through unrefcheck() (under objlock), while kthreadabort and thread creation drive the iteration through kthreadpermsallclear()/kthreadpermsinherit() (under listslock). A deprivileged user thread on a CONFIGSMP + CONFIGUSERSPACE build can therefore corrupt the kernel's object-tracking structures across the userspace security boundary, yielding kernel memory corruption (potential privilege escalation) or a kernel crash (denial of service). The fix removes objfreelock and serializes every objlist modification under listslock, including holding it across find+remove in kobjectfree() and around unrefcheck() in kthreadpermsclear(). Affects CONFIGSMP+CONFIGUSERSPACE+CONFIGDYNAMICOBJECTS configurations; the defect dates to the 2019 spinlockification (commit 8a3d57b6cc6, first released in v1.14.0) and shipped through v4.4.0.
In Zephyr's experimental USB host stack (CONFIGUSBHOSTSTACK), usbhdevicedisconnect() (subsys/usb/host/usbhdevice.c) freed the root usbdevice slab object without clearing the cached pointer ctx->root. The bus removal handler devremovedhandler() (subsys/usb/host/usbhcore.c) decides what to tear down solely from ctx->root, checking only that it is non-NULL.
Because UHC controller drivers (e.g. uhcmax3421e, uhcmcuxcommon) synthesize UHCEVTDEVREMOVED directly from physical bus line state with no debounce or state guard, an attacker with physical USB access (or a rogue device that bounces its connection) can deliver a second device-removed event after a root device disconnect. The handler then re-enters usbhdevicedisconnect() with the dangling pointer, locking a mutex inside the freed object (use-after-free), removing the freed node from the device list, and calling kmemslabfree() on the already-freed block (double-free). If the slab block has been reissued to a newly attached device in between, this corrupts a live object.
Impact is denial of service (crash) and memory corruption; the attack vector is physical/local. The flaw was introduced in v4.4.0 by the connect/disconnect refactor and is fixed by clearing ctx->root in usbhdevicedisconnect() before freeing.
In Zephyr's WireGuard subsystem (subsys/net/lib/wireguard), wgprocessdatamessage() in wgcrypto.c linearizes an inbound transport-data payload into a fixed pool buffer of CONFIGWIREGUARDBUFLEN bytes before decryption. The call netbuflinearize(buf->data, datalen, pkt->buffer, ..., datalen) passed the attacker-derived datalen as both the destination capacity and the copy length, defeating the function's internal len = min(len, dstlen) bound. datalen is derived from the received UDP datagram length and is only lower-bounded by wgctrlrecv() (no upper bound). When datalen exceeds CONFIGWIREGUARDBUFLEN — e.g. when the buffer length is lowered below the link MTU, on links with MTU above the buffer size, or via reassembled IPv4/IPv6 fragments that exceed it — the underlying memcpy writes past the end of the pool buffer, an out-of-bounds write (CWE-787). The overflow occurs before the Poly1305 authentication check, so it requires only a valid receiver session index rather than a valid authenticator, and is reachable by a malicious or compromised peer (or an on-path attacker driving an established session) over the network, yielding remote memory corruption and at minimum a reliable denial of service. The defect was present in the WireGuard implementation shipped in Zephyr 4.4.0. The fix adds an explicit datalen > CONFIGWIREGUARDBUFLEN rejection and corrects the linearize call to pass netbufmaxlen(buf) as the destination capacity.
The Dhara flash translation layer disk driver (drivers/disk/ftldhara.c) implemented the dharanand callbacks so that, on a flash error, the error code was written unconditionally through the caller-supplied dharaerrort err pointer (e.g. err = DHARAEECC in dharanandread, and similar in dharananderase/prog/copy).
The upstream Dhara library calls these callbacks with err == NULL along its journal-resume binary search: findlastcheckblock() invokes findcheckblock(j, mid, &found, NULL), which forwards the NULL pointer into dharanandread(). This path runs during diskftlaccessinit() -> dharamapresume() whenever the FTL disk is mounted/initialised.
If a flash read error (uncorrectable ECC, bad block, controller error) occurs on one of the probed checkpoint pages, the driver dereferences and writes to NULL, faulting the kernel (denial of service). The trigger is conditioned on the NAND medium content/health, which can be influenced by media wear, induced faults, or a corrupted/crafted on-flash image.
The fix routes all error assignments through the library's NULL-safe dharaseterror() helper. Affects Zephyr v4.4.0, where the driver was introduced.
The Bluetooth BAP Broadcast Assistant GATT client in subsys/bluetooth/audio/bapbroadcastassistant.c reassembled remote Broadcast Receive State data into a single file-static netbufsimple (attbuf, BTATTMAXATTRIBUTELEN = 512 bytes) shared by all connection instances, while the BUSY flag, long-read handle, and reset/offset state were per-connection.
When the device acts as a Broadcast Assistant connected to multiple Scan Delegator peripherals, notification and long-read callbacks from different connections interleave on the shared buffer: the append in notifyhandler (netbufsimpleaddmem at the not-busy branch) performs no tailroom check, so receive-state notifications from two or more delegators accumulate on the same 512-byte buffer and, with a sufficiently large configured ATT MTU (BTL2CAPTXMTU up to 2000) and two-to-three concurrent connections, write past the buffer into adjacent .bss (netbufsimpleadd only asserts in debug builds).
Even below the overflow threshold, one connection's netbufsimplereset zeroes the shared length while another connection's reassembly and GATT read offset are in flight, mixing one peer's data into another's parse. A malicious or compromised Scan Delegator (or two colluding peers) over BLE can trigger this, causing out-of-bounds writes (memory corruption / denial of service) and cross-connection data corruption.
The fix moves the buffer into the per-connection instance struct so each connection reassembles into its own buffer. Affects Zephyr releases shipping the Broadcast Assistant with the shared buffer, including v4.4.0 and earlier.
In Zephyr's IPv4 IGMP implementation, igmpsend() in subsys/net/ip/igmp.c read the network interface back out of the packet via netpktiface(pkt) after the packet had been handed to netsenddata(). On the successful-send path the packet's last reference may already have been released by the L2 driver or by the network stack's TX handling (synchronously in the default NETTCTXCOUNT=0 immediate-transmit configuration), returning the netpkt slab block to its free list. The subsequent netpktiface(pkt) dereferences the freed packet, a use-after-free read; with CONFIGNETSTATISTICSPERINTERFACE the resulting dangling interface pointer is further dereferenced for a statistics-counter write.
The IGMP send path is reachable without authentication from inbound IPv4 IGMP membership queries addressed to 224.0.0.1 (netipv4igmpinput -> sendigmpreport/sendigmpv3report -> igmpsend), as well as from local multicast join/leave/rejoin operations.
Realistic impact is undefined behavior and potential denial of service (sporadic crash or stats corruption); a controllable write requires the asynchronous TX path plus a concurrent slab reuse.
The flaw was introduced with IGMPv2 support and affects releases from v2.6.0 through v4.4.0. The fix caches the interface pointer before sending. Note the analogous IPv6 MLD path (mldsend in subsys/net/ip/ipv6mld.c) retains the same unfixed pattern.
Zephyr's Bluetooth Classic Hands-Free Profile (HFP) Hands-Free role parser (subsys/bluetooth/host/classic/hfphf.c) contains an out-of-bounds write. During Service Level Connection setup the HF sends AT+CIND=? and parses the AG's +CIND: response in cindhandle(), which assigns a per-entry counter index and calls cindhandlevalues() for each list element. cindhandlevalues() then wrote hf->indtable[index] = i without verifying that index is within the 20-element int8t indtable[] array of struct bthfphf. Because the parser places no cap on the number of +CIND: list entries, a remote Attendant Gateway (a malicious, compromised, or spoofed peer the device connects to over Bluetooth) can send a response with more than 20 recognized indicator entries and drive index arbitrarily large, writing a small attacker-positioned value past the array into adjacent struct fields (feature masks, SDP/version state, the calls[] array, work/atomic bookkeeping) and potentially beyond the static connection pool slot. This yields memory corruption and at least denial of service of the Bluetooth host, triggered by a single malformed AT response with no user interaction. The sibling consumer agindicatorhandlevalues() already performed the equivalent bounds check; this commit adds the same index >= ARRAYSIZE(hf->indtable) guard to close the gap. Affects builds with CONFIGBTHFPHF enabled; introduced with the original HFP HF CIND parser (~v1.7) and present through v4.4.0.
On Xtensa targets with CONFIGUSERSPACE and CONFIGXTENSAMMU, the page-table code (arch/xtensa/core/ptables.c) maintains a global list, xtensadomainlist, of active memory domains using a list node embedded inside the caller-owned struct kmemdomain. When a domain is destroyed via kmemdomaindeinit() -> archmemdomaindeinit(), the page tables are torn down and domain->arch.ptables is set to NULL, but the domain's node was not removed from xtensadomainlist. The freed/deinitialized domain therefore remained linked into the global list as a dangling pointer into caller-owned storage that may then be freed or reused.
Any subsequent archmemmap()/archmemunmap() operation (widely invoked by kernel memory-mapping and demand-paging code) traverses the stale node and dereferences domain->ptables: at minimum a NULL pointer dereference causing a fatal MMU exception (denial of service), and if the kmemdomain storage has been freed or reused, a use-after-free in which a stale/controlled ptables value is dereferenced and written through during the page-table walk (l2pagetablemap writes l1table[...] and l2table[...], and xtensammucomputedomainregs writes into the domain struct and the L1 table), yielding page-table memory corruption that can undermine userspace isolation.
The vulnerable path is reachable only from privileged kernel/supervisor code (kmemdomaindeinit is not a syscall), not directly from unprivileged user threads or remotely. Affected: Zephyr v4.4.0 (the Xtensa memory-domain de-initialization feature was introduced in commit 3032b58f52d and first shipped in v4.4.0); fixed on main by adding sysslistfindandremove() in archmemdomaindeinit(). The Xtensa MPU path is unaffected.
Zephyr sockets created with IPPROTOTLS13 can still negotiate a TLS 1.2 connection when both TLS versions are enabled in Kconfig, because the socket-level protocol selection is not propagated to mbedTLS (e.g. via mbedtlssslconfmintlsversion). The ClientHello advertises both versions and the peer can establish TLS 1.2, so applications that assumed IPPROTOTLS13 enforces TLS 1.3 may silently use TLS 1.2 and remain exposed to TLS 1.2-specific weaknesses. As a workaround, the TLSCIPHERSUITELIST socket option can be restricted to TLS 1.3-only cipher suites.
Issuing an ICMP ping via the net ping shell command to a device's own IPv4 address causes the network stack to recursively re-enter the input path on the same system work-queue stack. Because the destination is recognized as a local address, both the echo request and the resulting echo reply are processed inline before the current frame returns. The nested input-path frames exceed the work-queue stack and trigger a stack overflow.
A remote, unauthenticated BLE peer can trigger a 2-byte out-of-bounds write in the Bluetooth host during L2CAP LE CoC SDU reassembly. When the application enables segmentation (via chanops.allocbuf) and the chosen RX pool has a userdatasize smaller than 2 bytes, the segmentation counter stored in the netbuf userdata area is written out of bounds in l2capchanlerecvseg (subsys/bluetooth/host/l2cap.c). The observed effects are an AddressSanitizer abort and, without ASan, heap corruption / fatal error.