CVE-2026-9728 PUBLISHED

TOCTOU race in mbox_send syscall verifier allows userspace to leak kernel memory

Assigner: zephyr
Reserved: 27.05.2026 Published: 24.08.2026 Updated: 24.08.2026

The userspace syscall verifier z_vrfy_mbox_send() in drivers/mbox/mbox_handlers.c validated the nested msg->data/msg->size fields by reading them directly out of live userspace memory, and then forwarded the original, still-mutable userspace struct mbox_msg * pointer to z_impl_mbox_send() and the underlying driver. Between the access check and the driver's use of msg->data, the validated pointer could be replaced, leaving a time-of-check/time-of-use window.

On a system built with CONFIG_USERSPACE, any unprivileged userspace thread may invoke the mbox_send() system call. A second thread sharing the caller's address space can race to overwrite msg->data with a supervisor (kernel) address after the verifier's bounds check has passed but before the driver dereferences it. The driver then reads from the attacker-chosen address in supervisor context (for example memcpy(&data32, msg->data, msg->size) in the NXP mailbox driver, whose bytes are subsequently emitted to the peer mailbox endpoint).

The impact is a userspace-to-supervisor access-control bypass: disclosure of kernel memory contents (high confidentiality impact), or, for an invalid/unmapped target address, a faulting kernel read causing denial of service. The fix snapshots the entire struct mbox_msg into a kernel-stack copy with k_usermode_from_copy() and validates and forwards that immutable copy, closing the race.

Metrics

CVSS Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:L
CVSS Score: 6.4

Product Status

Vendor zephyrproject
Product zephyr
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 3.0.0 to 4.4.2 (excl.)

References

Problem Types

  • race CWE