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CVE-2026-87043

sys_rand_get() silently returns an unwritten buffer when the entropy device is not ready

Products / packages zephyrproject zephyr

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Severity and exploitation

Not in CISA KEV

KEV coverage does not rule out exploitation.

KEV checked 05/11/2026, 10:10:31 UTC
zephyr · CVSS:3.1 · 4.8
Assessment vectorCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:L/A:N

Severity

medium4.8

CVSS measures technical severity, not the likelihood of an attack.

Known exploitation

Not listed in the checked CISA KEV catalog

Absence from CISA KEV does not rule out attacks.

Public exploit

Not established by this record

Missing evidence does not mean no public exploit exists.

Remediation

Fix status not established

No structured fix or guidance is available here. Check the latest publisher advisory.

What this means

Zephyr versions before 4.5.0 have a vulnerability where sys_rand_get() returns an unwritten buffer when the entropy device is not ready, potentially disclosing stale memory contents. An attacker can observe and exploit the resulting non-random values remotely. The entropy device's 'not ready' state is a normal runtime condition.

Summarized by @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast. Verify details against the original sources.

Attack conditions

No attack-condition excerpt has been identified here. Review the full source description and references for authentication, network access, and configuration requirements.

Review supporting sources →

Affected versions

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zephyrproject · zephyr

zephyr

1 range

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affected

4.4.0 → before 4.5.0

semver versions

unaffected

unknown

Other versions: unaffected

Automatic dependency matching is unavailable for this record. Use the product evidence and publisher’s instructions to check your installation.

What to do

Compare your installed product and version with the affected versions above. A matching product name alone does not confirm exposure.

No structured fix or remediation guidance is available here. Check the full source description and vendor’s latest advisory for a patch or workaround; do not assume another version is safe.

cve.new guidance unless attributed to a publisher. This page does not inspect your installation.

Public exploit evidence

No public exploit reference is identified in the imported evidence. This is not a claim that no exploit exists.

Original source description

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The entropy-device random number generator in subsys/random/random_entropy_device.c returned early with -ENODEV from rand_get() as soon as device_is_ready() failed, before reaching the non-cryptographic system-timer fallback further down the same function. Because z_impl_sys_rand_get() returns void and discards that error — and the public sys_rand_get() syscall is itself declared void, so it cannot report failure — the caller's output buffer was left untouched and its previous contents were handed back as random data. The thin wrappers make this a plain uninitialized read: sys_rand32_get() declares uint32_t ret;, calls sys_rand_get(&ret, sizeof(ret)) and returns ret.

The "not ready" state is a normal runtime condition rather than a fault. Entropy drivers initialise at PRE_KERNEL_1 with CONFIG_ENTROPY_INIT_PRIORITY (default 50), so any earlier initialiser — kernel objects run at priority 30 — observes an unready device; the sibling generator subsys/random/random_xoshiro128.c and z_early_rand_get() in kernel/init.c both already carried an explicit timer fallback for exactly this case. The state is also permanent for the boot when an entropy driver's init hook fails, which several in-tree drivers can do on real hardware (entropy_stm32 on an RNG clock configuration error, entropy_psa_crypto when psa_crypto_init() fails, entropy_nrf_cracen, entropy_esp32, entropy_virtio).

When this occurs, every non-cryptographic random value in the system is either a constant or stale memory. coap_next_token() in subsys/net/lib/coap/coap.c fills a static buffer, so every CoAP token becomes the same .bss constant; tcp_init_isn() in subsys/net/ip/tcp.c returns an uninitialized stack word as the TCP initial sequence number; DHCPv4/DHCPv6 transaction IDs, WebSocket masking keys and RTP SSRCs are similarly degraded, and arch/arm64/core/pac.c derives per-thread Pointer Authentication keys from the same source. Where the bytes are transmitted directly — SSH packet padding, the netmidi2 session nonce, a DTLS connection ID on builds without CONFIG_CSPRNG_ENABLED — stale caller stack or heap contents are disclosed on the wire.

The fix initialises ret to -ENODEV and only calls entropy_get_entropy() when the device is ready, so the not-ready case now falls through to the timer fallback and the buffer is always written. The cryptographically secure path is unchanged: sys_csrand_get() still propagates the error to the caller and never silently degrades. An attacker cannot induce the unready state, but can observe and exploit the resulting non-random values remotely on an affected device.

References

2 sources

Inside the record

Evidence available

Package identity · not supplied
Version evidence
Remediation guidance · not supplied
Weakness classification
Additional publishers · not supplied

Describes the evidence in this view, not whether the product is safe.

Original records

CVE-2026-87043

View the latest unmodified CVE JSON from the official source. It may be newer than this imported page.

cve.new JSON →

Underlying weaknesses

The source’s classification of what caused the vulnerability.

Contributing organizations · 1
zephyr

Assigning organization

2026-11-04

Timeline

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  1. Advisory published

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  2. Last imported by cve.new

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What changed

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