CVE-2026-5857 PUBLISHED

Contiki-NG MQTT Client Out-of-Bounds Write in PUBLISH Topic Parser via Persistent State Between TCP Segments

Assigner: VulnCheck
Reserved: 08.04.2026 Published: 06.08.2026 Updated: 06.08.2026

Contiki-NG's MQTT client parse_publish_vhdr() in os/net/app-layer/mqtt/mqtt.c sets topic_len_received=1 before checking topic_len against the 64-byte limit, so an over-length topic returns early but leaves the flag set. On the next TCP segment, tcp_input() re-invokes the parser with topic_received==0, and the persisted topic_len_received==1 skips the length-reading block containing the guard, falling through directly to a memcpy() that uses the unvalidated 16-bit topic_len as the copy length. The 65-byte topic[] destination overruns into adjacent struct fields including the payload_chunk pointer, which subsequent MQTT code dereferences, giving a compromised or attacker-controlled broker an arbitrary-pointer-write primitive. Contiki-NG's MQTT implementation has no TLS support so the connection is plaintext. Impact ranges from information disclosure and denial of service to remote code execution on embedded targets without memory protection.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:H/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
CVSS Score: 9.2

Product Status

Vendor Contiki-NG
Product Contiki-NG
Versions Default: affected
  • affected from 0 to a34a2dbdc8bea784bd2ae5079aa4be520cd74f2d (excl.)

Credits

  • Kazuma Matsumoto, a security researcher at GMO Cybersecurity by IERAE, Inc. reporter

References

Problem Types

  • CWE-787 Out-of-bounds write CWE