Vulnerability · Published Aug 17, 2026 · Assigned by zephyr

CVE-2026-126306LoWPAN IPHC uncompression out-of-bounds read on reserved destination addressing mode

Medium 4.3

In plain English

A medium-severity out-of-bounds read in zephyr from zephyrproject. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.3% (higher than 18% of all known vulnerabilities).

Severity (CVSS 3.1)4.3Medium
Exploit odds (30 days)0.3%top 82.2% of all CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo reportsCISA SSVC: none
Attack toolingNoneno public tooling known

Official description

Zephyr's 6LoWPAN IP Header Compression (IPHC) uncompression code contains an out-of-bounds read in get_ihpc_inlined_size() (subsys/net/ip/6lo.c). The destination inline size is looked up in da_inline_size_table, which has 13 entries, using an index built from the M, DAC and DAM bits of the received IPHC dispatch word (iphc & NET_6LO_IPHC_DA_MASK, a 4-bit value of 0-15). The reserved combinations 13, 14 and 15 are not bounds-checked and read past the end of the table. The iphc word is taken directly from the received frame, and get_ihpc_inlined_size() is reached on every inbound 6LoWPAN frame via net_6lo_uncompress() from the 802.15.4 receive path (subsys/net/l2/ieee802154/ieee802154_6lo.c and ieee802154_6lo_fragment.c). An unauthenticated attacker on the radio/adjacent link can therefore craft a frame whose destination addressing-mode nibble selects an out-of-range index, with no privileges or user interaction. The out-of-bounds value becomes the computed inline_size, which then drives header reconstruction before the buffer-length check: it is used to dereference *(pkt->buffer->data + sizeof(iphc) + inline_size) and to compute a size_t diff that can underflow, leading to a further out-of-bounds read of the packet buffer and malformed uncompression. The practical impact is a radio-triggerable out-of-bounds read / denial-of-service on the receiver; the leaked byte is not returned to the attacker. The fix rejects any destination index beyond the table, aborting processing of the malformed frame.

Affected products (as reported)

VendorProductVersions
zephyrproject zephyr 2.0.0 – before 4.4.2

Weakness: CWE-125 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

References