TOCTOU race in mbox_send syscall verifier allows userspace to leak kernel memory
Severity and exploitation
KEV coverage does not rule out exploitation.
Assessment vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:LSeverity
medium6.4CVSS 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 3.0.0 to 4.3.2 and 4.4.0 to 4.4.2 have a TOCTOU race vulnerability in the mbox_send syscall verifier, allowing local users to leak kernel memory or cause a denial of service. The attacker needs access to the system and must share an address space with the caller. The impact is a userspace-to-supervisor access-control bypass.
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
2 ranges
zephyrproject · zephyr
zephyr
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affected
3.0.0 → before 4.3.2
semver versions
4.4.0 → before 4.4.2
semver versions
Other versions: unaffected
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
Read the full publisher description
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.
References
2 sourcesInside the record
Evidence available
Describes the evidence in this view, not whether the product is safe.
Original records
CVE-2026-9728View 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 · 2
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Timeline
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Source updated
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Last imported by cve.new
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What changed
Follow changesLarge field values are marked as truncated previews. Original source snapshots remain retained.