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CVE-2026-11812: UpdateHub: race condition on shared context causes out-of-bounds write and DoS

Description

The UpdateHub management subsystem (subsys/mgmt/updatehub/updatehub.c) drives every update operation through a single file-scope ctx structure that holds the CoAP block context, payload buffer, status code, socket, and a one-element poll-fd array fds[1]. Access to ctx was not serialized, and prepare_fds() wrote ctx.fds[ctx.nfds] and incremented ctx.nfds with no bounds check. Two independent paths mutate ctx concurrently: the background autohandler running on the system workqueue, and user-triggered operations reached through the updatehub run shell command, direct API calls, or — since the operations are exposed as syscalls — userspace threads. When a second flow enters prepare_fds() while ctx.nfds is already 1, the write lands one element past the array; by struct layout it overlaps the adjacent ctx.sock/ctx.nfds members. More broadly, the unsynchronized sharing lets two flows interleave connection setup and teardown, double-closing a socket descriptor or scribbling the shared buffers. The result is corruption of the update subsystem's internal state and denial of service of the firmware-update path; the out-of-bounds write is contained within the ctx structure and there is no demonstrated path to memory outside it or to code execution. Triggering requires a local actor able to invoke update operations (or, with CONFIG_USERSPACE, an unprivileged userspace thread) and to win a timing race against the background handler; remote peers cannot control the race timing. The fix serializes the entry points with a mutex and adds a bounds check to prepare_fds().

Affected products

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: zephyrproject zephyr 4.4.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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