Where
-Infinity
0
Severity
6.4
Buffer Overflow
AV:A/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:H

The Sierra Wireless HL7800 cellular modem driver (drivers/modem/vendorstandalone/hl7800.c, located at drivers/modem/hl7800.c in v4.4.0 and earlier) parses AT responses with roughly twenty handlers that call netbuflinearize(value, sizeof(value), buf, 0, len) into a 128-byte stack buffer and then write value[outlen] = 0. Because netbuflinearize() (lib/netbuf/buf.c) can return a count equal to its destination-length argument, a field that exactly fills the buffer makes the terminating NUL land one byte past the end, a single-byte out-of-bounds write into adjacent stack memory.

The +KCELLMEAS cell-measurement handler oncmdatcmdinforssi() is worse: it passed the wire length len as the destination size (netbuflinearize(value, len, buf, 0, len)), so a response line longer than 128 bytes overflows the value stack buffer with attacker-influenceable content. The line length comes from netbuffindcrlf(), which accumulates bytes across the whole netbuf fragment chain and is not bounded to 128, so an over-long line reaches the defect.

The data originates from the cellular modem over UART, driven by the network: operator-scan results, +CGCONTRDP IP/DNS info, socket indications, and +KCELLMEAS neighbour-cell reports. An attacker able to shape what the modem emits — a rogue base station, a compromised modem baseband, or a remote peer feeding oversized response framing — can drive a line past 128 bytes. The handlers run in the driver's RX thread in kernel context, so the corruption is kernel-side.

The +KCELLMEAS path is a full stack buffer overflow whose worst case is code execution in kernel context and whose floor is a reliable crash; the remaining sites are single-byte NUL out-of-bounds writes. Exploitation requires the modem to emit an over-long AT response line, giving high attack complexity over an adjacent (cellular radio) vector. The fix passes sizeof(dst) - 1 (and correct explicit bounds for the IMSI and +KCELLMEAS sites) so the terminator always stays in bounds.

First published (updated )

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