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CVE-2026-9771

Missing device-pointer validation in flash_copy() syscall allows userspace privilege escalation

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 · 8.8
Assessment vectorCVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

Severity

high8.8

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 4.0.0 to 4.3.2 and 4.4.0 to 4.4.2 have a weakness due to missing device-pointer validation in the flash_copy() syscall, allowing local privilege escalation. A user-mode thread can supply a forged struct device pointer to call arbitrary code in supervisor mode. This results in a local privilege escalation out of the userspace sandbox.

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

4.0.0 → 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 flash_copy() system call is verified by z_vrfy_flash_copy() in drivers/flash/flash_util.c. On builds with CONFIG_USERSPACE enabled, this handler is the kernel-side trust boundary for a user-mode caller. Prior to the fix it validated only the output buffer (K_SYSCALL_MEMORY_WRITE) and passed the two struct device * arguments, src_dev and dst_dev, directly into the implementation without any object validation — unlike every sibling flash syscall, which guards its device pointer with K_SYSCALL_DRIVER_FLASH.

A user-mode thread fully controls the values of src_dev/dst_dev and the contents of its own address space. The implementation z_impl_flash_copy() dereferences these pointers and calls through their driver-API function tables (e.g. api->get_parameters(dst_dev), flash_read(src_dev, ...), flash_write(dst_dev, ...)). By supplying a pointer to a forged struct device whose api table contains attacker-chosen function pointers, an unprivileged thread can cause the kernel to call arbitrary code in supervisor mode; passing any arbitrary or invalid address otherwise yields a kernel crash or out-of-bounds read.

The result is a local privilege escalation out of the userspace sandbox (with kernel denial-of-service and information disclosure as lesser outcomes). The fix adds K_SYSCALL_DRIVER_FLASH(src_dev, read) and K_SYSCALL_DRIVER_FLASH(dst_dev, write) to z_vrfy_flash_copy(), which verify each device is a registered flash-driver kernel object the calling thread is permitted to use before any dereference, closing the path completely.

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-2026-9771

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.

CWE-822 ↗

memory-safety

zephyr

Related →
CWE-862 ↗

memory-safety

zephyr

Related →
Contributing organizations · 2
zephyr

Assigning organization

2026-11-04
CISA-ADP

Additional data publisher

2026-08-17

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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