CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-19947

MediumCVSS 5.3
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.10%

1th percentile - higher than 1% of all known CVEs

Summary

A vulnerability in the Zephyr device multiplexer pseudo-driver (devmux) is caused by missing permission validation in the syscall verifiers for user-mode callers. With CONFIG_USERSPACE and CONFIG_DEVMUX enabled, a user thread can read and change the multiplexer's downstream device selection without authorization, because devmux devices are not registered as kernel objects and cannot be subject to access control.

Risk Assessment

An unprivileged user-mode thread can switch the multiplexer, suppress or redirect console, log and shell output, and flip the selection underneath another thread. Impact is bounded to the devicetree-fixed set of downstream devices, with no memory-safety violation.

Recommendation

Update Zephyr to a version containing the fix that declares devmux_driver_api and adds k_object_access_check() to both verifiers. If updating is not possible, consider disabling CONFIG_DEVMUX or CONFIG_USERSPACE if they are not required.

Related vulnerabilities

Original NVD description (English source)

The device multiplexer pseudo-driver in drivers/misc/devmux/devmux.c exposes two system calls, devmux_select_get() and devmux_select_set(). When CONFIG_USERSPACE is enabled, their user-mode verifiers z_vrfy_devmux_select_get() and z_vrfy_devmux_select_set() forwarded directly to the kernel implementations without performing any kernel-object validation — no k_object_access_check() and no driver object check. Compounding this, DEVICE_DT_INST_DEFINE() registered devmux instances with a NULL driver API pointer, which causes scripts/build/gen_kobject_list.py to skip them entirely, so a devmux device had no struct k_object and no permission on it could be granted or withheld in the first place. Any thread running in user mode can reach the defect: device pointers such as DEVICE_DT_GET(DT_NODELABEL(devmux0)) are compile-time constants available to application code, and the syscall accepted them from a thread that had never been granted access to the device. The kernel implementations do validate the pointer against the static devmux instance table and bounds-check the selection index, so this is not a memory-safety issue; the failure is purely one of authorization. Exposure requires CONFIG_USERSPACE=y together with the experimental CONFIG_DEVMUX=y (which depends on CONFIG_DEVICE_MUTABLE) and a zephyr,devmux devicetree node. An unprivileged user-mode thread can read and change which downstream device a multiplexer forwards to, bypassing the userspace object-permission model. Because a devmux forwards the data, configuration and API of the selected device — its documented use being zephyr,console and zephyr,shell-uart switching — an attacker can suppress console, log and shell output, redirect that output to a downstream device it is able to observe, or flip the selection underneath another thread that is legitimately using the multiplexer. The impact is bounded to the devicetree-fixed set of downstream devices; no out-of-bounds access or arbitrary pointer dereference is reachable. The fix declares __subsystem struct devmux_driver_api and attaches a DEVICE_API(devmux, devmux_api) instance to each devmux device so that it becomes a tracked K_OBJ_DRIVER_DEVMUX kernel object, and adds K_OOPS(devmux_inst_get(dev) == SIZE_MAX) plus K_OOPS(k_object_access_check(dev) != 0) to both verifiers.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS