Skip to content
Heist/ feed
Medium

Wild pointer dereference in Zephyr BSD sockets when a TCP listening socket reports an asynchronous error

Type: advisorySource: Official CVE List1 source record

The native BSD-socket layer recorded a pending asynchronous socket error by type-punning it into struct net_context's void user_data field (ctx->user_data = INT_TO_POINTER(-status) in zsock_accepted_cb(), zsock_received_cb(), zsock_connected_cb() and zsock_close_ctx() in subsys/net/lib/sockets/sockets_inet.c), reading it back with POINTER_TO_INT(). That same field is owned by the network stack for listening TCP contexts: net_tcp_accept() stores the parent context pointer there and the TCP core passes it back to the registered accept callback. A failed accept therefore left a small integer (an errno value) where the stack expected a struct net_context . When the network interface carrying a listening TCP socket goes down, close_tcp_conn() in subsys/net/ip/tcp.c invokes the accept callback with -ENETDOWN and the context's user_data. In v4.3.0 the callback was not disarmed afterwards, so a second interface-down event forwarded the previously stored errno to zsock_accepted_cb(), which dereferenced it as the parent context and performed several stores through it (sock_set_error()'s read-modify-write of socket_data, k_fifo_cancel_wait(&parent->recv_q)) — the crash described in the fix's commit message. v4.3.1 and v4.4.x carry a later change clearing conn->accept_cb after the error callback (269cb8823d3 on the v4.3 branch, 913fae5169425550f2364655298fceb79b320066 on main), which closes that repeat path; on those releases the poisoned cookie remains reachable only by a narrower race,

Announced Group revision 1
Original source ↗

CVE-2026-18417

Primary source · Revision 1

Imported from structured advisory data. Source references identify upstream records or fields; verify affected versions and your deployed configuration.

Security context

Source reference: cve:CVE-2026-18417

zephyr

Source reference: /containers/cna/affected/0/product

Affected versions
Not stated in this record
Fixed versions
Not stated in this record
Prerequisites
Not stated in this record

Structured affected-version data

Original package identities and version rules from this source.

[
  {
    "vendor": "zephyrproject",
    "product": "zephyr",
    "versions": [
      {
        "status": "affected",
        "version": "4.3.0",
        "lessThan": "4.4.2",
        "versionType": "semver"
      }
    ],
    "packageName": "zephyr",
    "programFiles": [
      "include/zephyr/net/net_context.h",
      "subsys/net/lib/sockets/sockets_inet.c",
      "subsys/net/lib/sockets/sockets_internal.h"
    ],
    "collectionURL": "https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr",
    "defaultStatus": "unaffected",
    "programRoutines": [
      {
        "name": "close_tcp_conn"
      },
      {
        "name": "zsock_accepted_cb"
      }
    ]
  }
]
Related CVEs
CVE-2026-18417

Source reference: /cveMetadata/cveId

Publisher severity

medium

Source reference: /containers/cna/metrics

Event
#4372 · Revision 1
Added to Heist Feed
Publisher date
Read the original announcement