Out-of-bounds write in Zephyr Ethernet L2 when adding the link-layer header to a forwarded packet
- Published
- Last modified
- Where the record stands: published, rejected by its publisher, or superseded by another id.What do these mean? →
- published
- Whether CISA lists it in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog: proof that attackers are using it.What do these mean? →
- Not listed in CISA KEV
- Fix
- Fix or patch referenced
- Whether working attack code is public (Exploit-DB, Metasploit, Nuclei or GitHub). Public code makes attacks easier.What do these mean? →
- None on Exploit-DB, Metasploit or GitHub
Summary
Zephyr RTOS's Ethernet L2 networking stack is affected, specifically when forwarded or tunneled packets from other interfaces are sent out over Ethernet, such as in IPv4/IPv6 forwarding and IPIP tunnel configurations. The flaw is an out-of-bounds memory write that can corrupt adjacent buffer data or heap metadata, potentially causing crashes or other unpredictable behavior on the device.
Summarized by anthropic/claude-haiku-5.5. Verify details against the original sources.
Read the original description
ethernet_fill_header() in subsys/net/l2/ethernet/ethernet.c can prepend the Ethernet header in place, by pushing it into the headroom of the packet's first fragment, instead of allocating a separate header fragment. Before this fix the in-place path was selected purely from the build-time value of CONFIG_NET_L2_ETHERNET_RESERVE_HEADER, with no check that the packet actually has that headroom, and then called net_buf_push(pkt->buffer, hdr_len). Only Ethernet TX allocations reserve that space: net_pkt_alloc_buffer() invokes the L2 alloc hook (ethernet_l2_alloc()) only when is_pkt_tx() is true and the packet's interface is the Ethernet interface. A packet that was allocated by a different L2 and then handed to Ethernet for transmission therefore has too little (usually zero) headroom. Such packets are produced by ordinary routing and tunnelling paths: net_route_packet_if() re-targets a received packet to another interface when CONFIG_NET_IPV4_FORWARDING / CONFIG_NET_IPV6_FORWARDING are enabled (for example an 802.15.4/OpenThread or PPP interface forwarding to Wi-Fi/Ethernet), net_route_ipv6_mcast_forward_packet() forwards an RX-slab clone that carries no reserve, and the IPIP tunnel interface_send() prepends an outer IP header allocated on the virtual interface. In these configurations a remote or adjacent attacker triggers the condition simply by sending traffic that the device forwards. Because net_buf_simple_push() only asserts on the headroom bound, a build without CONFIG_ASSERT (and without the newer CONFIG_NET_BUF_HARDENING) moves the fragment data pointer below the start of its data block and writes 14 bytes — 18 with VLAN — of Ethernet header out of bounds. With the default fixed-size buffer pools this overwrites the tail of the neighbouring buffer's payload or memory preceding the pool array; with variable-size pools it overwrites the buffer reference count and the heap chunk header. The attacker controls neither the written bytes nor the offset, so the practical impact is memory corruption leading to a crash, packet corruption, or heap inconsistency rather than controlled code execution. The fix takes the in-place path only when net_buf_headroom(pkt->buffer) is large enough and otherwise falls back to a separate header fragment.
Timeline
- CVE published
- First seen by cve.now
Affected versions
- zephyr
From 4.1.0 · through 4.4.2