CVE-2026-7656
HighCVSS 8.1Exploitation Probability (EPSS)
Low risk24th percentile - higher than 24% of all known CVEs
Summary
A vulnerability in Zephyr RTOS affects IPv6 Neighbor Discovery handlers. Incorrect boolean logic causes all RFC 4861 validity checks (including the mandatory Hop Limit == 255) to be bypassed when the ICMPv6 code field is 0 (normal for ND). This allows an attacker to inject forged RA/NS/NA messages.
Risk Assessment
An adjacent (or remote, due to Hop Limit bypass) attacker can reconfigure the victim's IPv6 settings, poison the neighbor cache, redirect traffic (MITM), or cause denial of service. DNS servers can also be overridden if CONFIG_NET_IPV6_RA_RDNSS is enabled.
Recommendation
Upgrade Zephyr RTOS to a patched version (later than v4.4.0) immediately. If upgrading is not possible, restrict trust in the local network and consider disabling IPv6 ND handling or filtering ICMPv6 traffic at network boundaries.
Other vulnerabilities in Zephyr RTOS
See all- 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-2026-19575High
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).
- CVE-2026-16513High
A vulnerability in the RTIO syscall verifier in Zephyr RTOS (before v4.3.0) allows an unprivileged user thread to write a pointer to controlled data at an arbitrary kernel address. The missing K_SYSCALL_MEMORY_WRITE check for the handle output parameter enables privilege escalation to kernel mode.
- CVE-2026-16514Medium
The gptp_mi_qualify_announce() function in Zephyr's gPTP subsystem processes received Announce messages by comparing clock identities. The comparison loop uses an attacker-controlled step count (steps_removed) instead of the actual number of TLV entries, leading to an out-of-bounds read. A single frame can cause about 2KB of overread, potentially crashing the networking RX thread and causing denial of service.
- CVE-2026-16512Low
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.
Original NVD description (English source)
The IPv6 Neighbor Discovery handlers in subsys/net/ip/ipv6_nbr.c (handle_ra_input, handle_ns_input, handle_na_input) used an incorrect boolean expression that combined the RFC 4861 validity checks with the ICMPv6 code check using the wrong operator precedence: the form was ((length/hop/source/target checks) && (icmp_hdr->code != 0)). Because every legitimate ND message carries ICMPv6 code 0, an attacker setting code == 0 (the normal value) caused the entire predicate to evaluate false, so the packet was never dropped and all of the other checks were silently skipped. The bypassed checks include the mandatory Hop Limit == 255 verification (which proves an ND packet originated on-link and was not forwarded) and, for Router Advertisements, the requirement that the source be a link-local address, as well as multicast-target sanity checks. As a result, an adjacent on-link attacker — and, because the Hop-Limit-255 guard is bypassed, potentially a remote/off-link attacker whose packets would otherwise be rejected — can have forged Router Advertisement, Neighbor Solicitation, and Neighbor Advertisement messages accepted. A forged RA lets the attacker reconfigure the victim's default router, on-link prefixes (SLAAC), MTU, reachable/retransmit timers, and (with CONFIG_NET_IPV6_RA_RDNSS) DNS servers, while forged NS/NA enable neighbor-cache poisoning, enabling man-in-the-middle, traffic redirection, and denial of service. The flaw is an input-validation/authentication weakness rather than a memory-safety issue: the underlying packet-parsing primitives (net_pkt_get_data, net_pkt_read, net_pkt_skip) are independently bounds-safe and the validated length is the true buffer length, so skipping the length check causes no out-of-bounds access. The defect has existed since the logic was introduced in 2018 and shipped in all releases through v4.4.0; it is fixed by splitting the condition so any failing check drops the packet.
Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS

