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3.4
CVE-2026-18418: Zbus proxy agent can read beyond buffer and expose memory
CVE-2026-18418 · published 7 days ago
Summary
The Zbus proxy agent’s inter‑process communication code may read past the end of a data structure when it logs an invalid message. This can cause parts of the system’s memory to appear in log output, potentially revealing internal information. Update the firmware to a version that fixes the logging routine or disable the affected logging level.
Original advisory text
Out-of-bounds read when the zbus proxy agent IPC backend logs a rejected peer frame's channel name
The zbus proxy agent IPC backend in subsys/zbus/proxy_agent/zbus_proxy_agent_ipc.c logged the channel name of a rejected inter-domain frame with a plain %s conversion. The frame type struct zbus_proxy_msg carries a fixed-size channel_name[] array as its last member, and nothing in the transport guarantees the array is NUL-terminated. The only code that verifies termination is zbus_proxy_agent_receive_cb() in subsys/zbus/proxy_agent/zbus_proxy_agent.c, which rejects the frame in precisely those cases — so the warning printed a non-terminated buffer exactly on the error paths where the name had been found invalid (or, for an invalid message_size, had not been inspected at all).
Any peer domain able to place a frame of sizeof(struct zbus_proxy_msg) bytes on the bound ipc_service endpoint can trigger it, by sending a frame with an out-of-range message_size or with channel_name[] containing no NUL byte. Reaching the code requires CONFIG_ZBUS_PROXY_AGENT_IPC and logging built at warning level or above (the default), and requires control over the firmware of the peer domain — typically a second core on the same SoC.
The resulting strlen() inside the log packager walks past the end of the frame object until it finds a zero byte. With the icmsg backend the frame lives in a stack buffer of the IPC work-queue thread, so bytes of that thread's stack are rendered into the log message; with the rpmsg backends the scan continues through the shared vring memory. Impact is bounded to disclosure of a small amount of adjacent memory into the receiving domain's log sink, plus a possible fatal fault if the scan leaves a mapped region; the log packager's own -ENOSPC bound prevents the overrun from becoming a write. The fix bounds the conversion with %.*s and MIN(msg->channel_name_len, sizeof(msg->channel_name)).
Any peer domain able to place a frame of sizeof(struct zbus_proxy_msg) bytes on the bound ipc_service endpoint can trigger it, by sending a frame with an out-of-range message_size or with channel_name[] containing no NUL byte. Reaching the code requires CONFIG_ZBUS_PROXY_AGENT_IPC and logging built at warning level or above (the default), and requires control over the firmware of the peer domain — typically a second core on the same SoC.
The resulting strlen() inside the log packager walks past the end of the frame object until it finds a zero byte. With the icmsg backend the frame lives in a stack buffer of the IPC work-queue thread, so bytes of that thread's stack are rendered into the log message; with the rpmsg backends the scan continues through the shared vring memory. Impact is bounded to disclosure of a small amount of adjacent memory into the receiving domain's log sink, plus a possible fatal fault if the scan leaves a mapped region; the log packager's own -ENOSPC bound prevents the overrun from becoming a write. The fix bounds the conversion with %.*s and MIN(msg->channel_name_len, sizeof(msg->channel_name)).
References
- https://github.com/CVEProject/cvelistV5/tree/main/cves/2026/18xxx/CVE-2026-18418... Vendor Advisory
- https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr Product
- https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-18418 Vendor Advisory
- https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/commit/fc065f79a568a6c6cc14b89795bd... Patch
- https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/security/advisories/GHSA-48w8-fjhj-... Vendor Advisory
Internet-facing
60 days
Internal
At next upgrade
- Not known to be exploited
- Needs hands-on effort to exploit
- Gives an attacker partial control
Type
CWE-125Out-of-bounds Read
Timeline
Published11 Oct 2026
Updated16 Oct 2026
First seen11 Oct 2026
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