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CVE-2026-9728

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

Products / packages zephyrproject zephyr

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Severity and exploitation

Not in CISA KEV

KEV coverage does not rule out exploitation.

KEV checked 14/11/2026, 20:55:32 UTC
zephyr · CVSS:3.1 · 6.4
Assessment vectorCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:N/A:L

Severity

medium6.4

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 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

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affected

3.0.0 → before 4.3.2

semver versions

4.4.0 → before 4.4.2

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

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 sources

Inside the record

Evidence available

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

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

Original records

CVE-2026-9728

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cve.new JSON →

Underlying weaknesses

The source’s classification of what caused the vulnerability.

Contributing organizations · 2
zephyr

Assigning organization

2026-11-04
CISA-ADP

Additional data publisher

2026-08-25

Timeline

All times UTC
  1. Advisory published

    Publication date supplied by the source.

  2. Source updated

    Latest modification date supplied by the source.

  3. Last imported by cve.new

    Latest catalog import, not the date we first saw this advisory.

What changed

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