CVE-2026-16512
LowCVSS 3.1Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk7th percentile - higher than 7% of all known CVEs
Summary
The gptp_handle_msg() function in Zephyr RTOS does not validate the received frame length before dereferencing the gPTP header pointer. A truncated frame can lead to out-of-bounds reads, disclosing stale memory contents.
Risk Assessment
An unauthenticated peer on the same link can send a crafted Ethernet frame, causing memory disclosure from the device. This may leak sensitive information, though there is no integrity or availability impact.
Recommendation
Update Zephyr RTOS to a patched version that fixes the frame length validation in gPTP. If not possible, disable gPTP on untrusted interfaces or apply traffic filtering.
Other vulnerabilities in Zephyr RTOS
See all- CVE-2026-82962Medium
A vulnerability in ethernet_fill_header() in the Zephyr RTOS network stack prepends the Ethernet header in place via net_buf_push without verifying that the packet has sufficient headroom. Packets allocated by a different L2 (e.g., 802.15.4/OpenThread, PPP) and handed to Ethernet through routing or tunnelling have too little (usually zero) headroom, causing an out-of-bounds write. In builds without CONFIG_ASSERT and CONFIG_NET_BUF_HARDENING this results in memory corruption.
- CVE-2026-19595Medium
A vulnerability in the Zephyr RTOS syscall verifier: z_vrfy_rtio_cqe_get_mempool_buffer() validated its output parameters buff and buff_len with K_SYSCALL_MEMORY_READ() instead of K_SYSCALL_MEMORY_WRITE(). This allows an unprivileged user-mode thread to invoke the syscall with pointers to read-only memory, causing a supervisor-mode store outside the permitted region or a kernel fault that halts or reboots the device.
- CVE-2026-19940Medium
A vulnerability in the Bluetooth Classic Hands-Free Profile Audio Gateway (HFP AG) implementation in Zephyr RTOS causes corruption of the kernel timeout list. By sending AT+CIND? and quickly reconnecting, a remote attacker can trigger a system-wide fault or hang.
- CVE-2026-19736High
The NXP MCUX TRNG entropy driver in Zephyr (drivers/entropy/entropy_mcux_trng.c) passes the caller's byte count directly to the SDK routine TRNG_GetRandomData(), which on i.MX RT5xx/RT6xx parts always copies whole 32-bit words and rounds entropy draws up to a multiple of 128 bytes. A request length not a multiple of four causes an underflow in the SDK's buffer-full check, leading to an overflow of up to 127 bytes past the caller's buffer.
- CVE-2026-19575High
A vulnerability in Zephyr RTOS affects the user-mode verification handler z_vrfy_device_deinit() in kernel/device.c, which validated its dev argument with K_SYSCALL_OBJ_INIT(dev, K_OBJ_ANY). Because k_object_validate() short-circuits type comparison for K_OBJ_ANY, the check only verified that the pointer was the base address of some kernel object the calling thread was granted, without comparing the object's actual type. This allows a local user-mode thread to pass a thread stack object (e.g., from k_thread_stack_alloc()) and achieve supervisor-mode kernel code execution.
- CVE-2026-19574High
In the ARM64 MMU back-end of Zephyr RTOS, address space identifiers (ASIDs) are assigned by a bare round-robin counter, which after wrapping past 255 possible values can hand the same ASID to a new domain while a still-live domain holds it. Because domain-private mappings are installed as non-global (MT_NG), the ASID is the only tag separating cached translations in the TLB, and the context-switch path does not flush the TLB for a duplicate reached through a third domain. As a result, user-mode threads in one domain can read and write memory belonging to another domain, defeating memory-domain isolation.
- CVE-2026-19569High
A vulnerability in the Zephyr RTOS kernel allows an unprivileged user-mode thread to perform an out-of-bounds write in kernel memory. It stems from missing overflow checks when calculating allocation sizes for dynamic kernel objects, leading to undersized heap allocations. An attacker can exploit this to escalate privileges and execute arbitrary code at the kernel level.
- CVE-2026-19185High
A vulnerability was found in the system-call verifier for i3c_do_ccc() in Zephyr RTOS, which fails to validate per-target data pointers in the i3c_ccc_payload structure. The verifier also operates on the caller's live structure, allowing another thread to modify fields between check and use. This allows an unprivileged thread to write to arbitrary kernel addresses (via read CCC) or disclose kernel memory (via write CCC), leading to privilege escalation.
- CVE-2026-18747Medium
A vulnerability in the SMP-over-console transport in Zephyr RTOS allows an unauthenticated attacker to trigger a buffer length underflow by sending a single 7-byte frame to the management console. This leads to an out-of-bounds read, potentially causing a denial of service on the MCUmgr thread or memory disclosure.
- CVE-2026-18417Medium
In Zephyr RTOS, a vulnerability exists in the BSD socket layer where an asynchronous error was stored in the user_data field of the network context, which for listening TCP sockets is used to store a pointer to the parent context. In v4.3.0, after an interface-down event, the accept callback was not disarmed, leading to reuse of the poisoned value as a pointer and writes to an invalid address, causing a kernel fatal error (device crash or reset).
Original NVD description (English source)
gptp_handle_msg() in subsys/net/l2/ethernet/gptp/gptp.c dereferenced the gPTP header returned by GPTP_HDR() and switched on hdr->message_type without first checking that the received frame carries at least sizeof(struct gptp_hdr) (34) bytes of payload. The header accessor gptp_get_hdr() deliberately never fails for a short buffer — it returns pkt->frags->data and leaves validation to its callers — so a truncated frame produced a header pointer covering memory beyond the received data. The per-message-type checks that follow do not compensate: GPTP_VALID_LEN() reduces to len > 60 once the Ethernet header has been pulled, which is false for every fixed-size gPTP message, so GPTP_CHECK_LEN() never rejects a truncated SYNC, FOLLOWUP, PDELAY_RESP or SIGNALING message. The defect is reached by an unauthenticated peer on the same link sending an Ethernet frame with ethertype 0x88F7 to the PTP multicast address on an interface configured as a gPTP port, with CONFIG_NET_GPTP enabled. Because conformant Ethernet pads frames to 60 bytes, a payload shorter than 34 bytes generally requires a link that can deliver sub-minimum frames — for example the native_sim TAP driver (drivers/ethernet/eth_native_tap.c), which forwards whatever length the host device supplies, or a MAC configured to accept undersized frames. The short packet is retained (net_pkt_ref() into rcvd_sync_ptr, rcvd_follow_up_ptr, rcvd_pdelay_resp_ptr or rcvd_announce_ptr) and later parsed by the media-dependent and media-independent state machines in subsys/net/l2/ethernet/gptp/gptp_md.c and subsys/net/l2/ethernet/gptp/gptp_mi.c, which read tens of further bytes and copy some of them (the announce priority vector, hdr->port_id) into state that is subsequently transmitted. Under the default fixed-size buffer allocator (CONFIG_NET_BUF_FIXED_DATA_SIZE, 128-byte fragments) the accesses stay inside the allocated fragment and disclose stale recycled buffer contents; under the experimental CONFIG_NET_BUF_VARIABLE_DATA_SIZE allocator, where fragments are heap-allocated at the exact frame length, they are genuine out-of-bounds reads. There is no write and no availability impact.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS

