Medium severity · published Jun 24, 2026
CVE-2026-10642
Unbounded TX busy-loop DoS in Zephyr PL011 UART driver under CTS hardware flow control
4.6
CVSS
0.2%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
The Zephyr PL011 UART driver (drivers/serial/uart_pl011.c) contains an unbounded software loop in pl011_irq_tx_enable() that repeatedly invokes the interrupt-driven application callback while the TX interrupt mask bit (PL011_IMSC_TXIM) is set, to work around the controller's level-transition TX-interrupt behavior.
When CTS hardware flow control is enabled (devicetree hw-flow-control or runtime UART_CFG_FLOW_CTRL_RTS_CTS) and the wired serial peer de-asserts CTS, the controller stops draining the TX FIFO; pl011_fifo_fill() then returns 0 on every call while the application still has pending data and therefore never disables the TX interrupt. The loop condition never clears, so the thread that called uart_irq_tx_enable() (e.g. h4_send() in the Bluetooth HCI H4 driver) spins indefinitely, hanging the executing context and stalling the transport — a denial of service (CWE-835).
An attacker controlling the device attached to the UART's CTS line can trigger the hang by withholding CTS during transmission. Because that peer is the device wired to the UART — which may be a removable or external module (e.g. an off-board Bluetooth controller on the HCI H4 link) rather than a permanently-bonded on-PCB part — the attack vector is scored Adjacent (AV:A) rather than Physical; the security subcommittee should confirm the vector against the specific deployment. Impact is availability only; there is no memory-safety, confidentiality, or integrity consequence.
The vulnerable loop was introduced in commit b783bc8448ef (Feb 2025) and shipped in releases v4.1.0 through v4.4.0. The fix breaks out of the loop when CTS is blocking and arms the CTS modem-status interrupt to resume transmission when CTS re-asserts.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:P/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Attack vector
Physical
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
High
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.2% · higher than 15% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
ZE
zephyr · zephyrproject
4.1.0 before 4.3.1; 4.4.0 before 4.4.2 · source: vendor, NVD
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-10642
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-10642
Patch
https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/commit/68e702294b711eadfe7b4fadedd46d7c87fe8f3d
Exploit
https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/security/advisories/GHSA-3fgh-73jh-2q5j
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