CVE-2026-11812 PUBLISHED

UpdateHub: race condition on shared context causes out-of-bounds write and DoS

Assigner: zephyr
Reserved: 09.06.2026 Published: 10.08.2026 Updated: 10.08.2026

The UpdateHub management subsystem (subsys/mgmt/updatehub/updatehub.c) drives every update operation through a single file-scope ctx structure that holds the CoAP block context, payload buffer, status code, socket, and a one-element poll-fd array fds[1]. Access to ctx was not serialized, and prepare_fds() wrote ctx.fds[ctx.nfds] and incremented ctx.nfds with no bounds check.

Two independent paths mutate ctx concurrently: the background autohandler running on the system workqueue, and user-triggered operations reached through the updatehub run shell command, direct API calls, or — since the operations are exposed as syscalls — userspace threads. When a second flow enters prepare_fds() while ctx.nfds is already 1, the write lands one element past the array; by struct layout it overlaps the adjacent ctx.sock/ctx.nfds members. More broadly, the unsynchronized sharing lets two flows interleave connection setup and teardown, double-closing a socket descriptor or scribbling the shared buffers.

The result is corruption of the update subsystem's internal state and denial of service of the firmware-update path; the out-of-bounds write is contained within the ctx structure and there is no demonstrated path to memory outside it or to code execution. Triggering requires a local actor able to invoke update operations (or, with CONFIG_USERSPACE, an unprivileged userspace thread) and to win a timing race against the background handler; remote peers cannot control the race timing. The fix serializes the entry points with a mutex and adds a bounds check to prepare_fds().

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
CVSS Score: 2.5

Product Status

Vendor zephyrproject
Product zephyr
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 2.0.0 to 4.4.1 (incl.)

References

Problem Types

  • race CWE