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