CVE-2026-68330
HighCVSS 7.8Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk6th percentile - higher than 6% of all known CVEs
Summary
In the Linux kernel, the airoha network driver has a DMA direction bug for the NPU mailbox buffer. airoha_npu_send_msg() always maps the buffer with DMA_TO_DEVICE, but some callers expect the NPU to write response data back into the same buffer. On non-cache-coherent architectures, this can lead to reading stale data.
Risk Assessment
This can cause silent data corruption in NPU communication, potentially leading to network malfunction or device errors.
Recommendation
Apply the patch that uses DMA_BIDIRECTIONAL for both map and unmap to ensure cache invalidation on non-coherent systems.
Original NVD description (English source)
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: airoha: Fix DMA direction for NPU mailbox buffer airoha_npu_send_msg() always maps the mailbox buffer with DMA_TO_DEVICE, but some callers expect the NPU to write response data back into the same buffer: - airoha_npu_wlan_msg_get() (NPU_OP_GET): NPU writes response into the buffer, then the caller reads it via memcpy() - airoha_npu_ppe_stats_setup() (NPU_OP_SET): NPU writes back npu_stats_addr field in the response On non-cache-coherent architectures like EN7581 (Cortex-A53 without hardware cache coherency for NPU DMA), DMA_TO_DEVICE unmap is a no-op — it does not invalidate the CPU cache. If the NPU-written cache line is still present in the CPU cache when the caller reads the buffer, the CPU observes stale data instead of the NPU response. This is a timing-sensitive bug: small mailbox buffers (~24 bytes) typically fit in a single cache line and may survive in the cache until the caller reads them, producing silent data corruption rather than a crash. The bug is more likely to trigger when the caller reads the response immediately after dma_unmap_single() without intervening cache-evicting operations. Fix by using DMA_BIDIRECTIONAL for both map and unmap, which ensures dma_unmap_single() invalidates the CPU cache on non-coherent systems. The mailbox buffers are small so there is no performance concern.

