Public vulnerability disclosure

CVE-2026-12632

Out-of-bounds read in Zephyr PTP message parsing from unvalidated message type

publishedCWE-125

Zephyr's Precision Time Protocol receive handler ptp_msg_post_recv() in subsys/net/lib/ptp/msg.c takes the 4-bit message type straight off the wire via ptp_msg_type() (msg->header.type_major_sdo_id & 0xF, range 0-15) and uses it to index the msg_size[] table. That table only defines entries up to PTP_MSG_MANAGEMENT (0xD), giving it ARRAY_SIZE == 14. Before the fix there was no upper-bound check, so the undefined types 0xE and 0xF indexed one or two int slots past the end of the array — an out-of-bounds read of adjacent read-only data. The out-of-bounds value is then reused as a length: it gates msg_size[type] > cnt, and when it is small or negative it makes cnt - msg_size[type] a large positive budget passed to msg_tlv_post_recv(), whose TLV loop then walks the message suffix past the received bytes, performing further out-of-bounds reads and in-place byte-swap writes on memory beyond the message slab. The defect is reached directly from the network: ptp_port_event_gen() in subsys/net/lib/ptp/port.c reads a PTP frame with ptp_transport_recv() and calls ptp_msg_post_recv() with the attacker-chosen type. PTP uses UDP multicast or raw Ethernet (0x88F7) and is unauthenticated, so any host on the same link can trigger the indexing on a CONFIG_PTP-enabled node with no preconditions. The reliably reproducible impact is a denial of service (fault/crash); a limited memory-corruption path exists but depends on the build-specific value adjacent to msg_size[], which the attacker cannot tune. The fix rejects type >= ARRAY_SIZE(msg_size) with -EBADMSG before any indexing.

Technical severity6.5 mediumCVSS 3.1 · CNA: zephyr
Published2026-08-18Source updated 2026-11-04
Collected2026-11-043 attributed sources

Fixes and workarounds

Fix

The reporting source identifies this reference as a patch. Check the advisory for affected versions and supported release branches.

Source: CNA: zephyr

Affected products and versions

Affected products, source version ranges and reporting authorities
ProductVersionsAuthority
zephyr
zephyrproject
zephyr
https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr
≥ 3.7.0; < 4.3.2 (affected, semver)
≥ 4.4.0; < 4.4.2 (affected, semver)
Other versions: unaffected
CNA: zephyr

Version ranges are source assertions. Check the vendor advisory and your installed configuration before determining exposure.

CVSS assessments

CVSS scores, vectors and reporting authorities
Version / scoreVectorAuthority
3.1 / 6.5
medium
CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HCNA: zephyr
3.1 / 6.5
medium
CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:HNVD: [email protected]

Exploit evidence

No exploit evidence in collected sources. This is not proof of no exploitation.

References

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