High severity · published Jul 21, 2026
CVE-2026-10678
NULL-pointer / out-of-bounds write in Zephyr MCTP I2C+GPIO target binding driven by an unauthenticated I2C controller
8.1
CVSS
0.4%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
The MCTP-over-I2C+GPIO target binding in Zephyr (subsys/pmci/mctp/mctp_i2c_gpio_target.c) processes pseudo-register writes from an I2C bus master byte-by-byte in mctp_i2c_gpio_target_write_received() without validating the order or the receive buffer. In the affected versions the MCTP_I2C_GPIO_RX_MSG_ADDR (data) handler dereferences and writes through b->rx_pkt without checking that the receive buffer was allocated: a controller that selects the data register and writes a byte without first sending the length register (which is what allocates the buffer) causes a write of an attacker-chosen byte through a NULL/unallocated mctp_pktbuf pointer (i.e. into a small attacker-advanceable offset above address 0), producing memory corruption or a hard fault.
The same handler also performs a write-then-check bounds test, allowing a one-byte heap overflow at data[255] when more than 255 data bytes are sent.
Because the I2C target callback is invoked with raw bytes supplied by whatever device is the bus master and the binding performs no authentication, a malicious or malfunctioning controller on the bus can trigger these without any prior protocol state, leading to memory corruption and/or denial of service on the target device.
The vulnerable code was introduced when the I2C+GPIO target binding was added and shipped in Zephyr v4.3.0 and v4.4.0. The fix defers allocation to the first data byte with a NULL check, treats a missing length as a zero-sized packet rejected by libmctp, and moves the bounds check before the store.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H
Attack vector
Adjacent
Complexity
Low
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
High
Availability
High
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.4% · higher than 33% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
ZE
zephyr · zephyrproject
4.3.0 before 4.3.1; 4.4.0 before 4.4.2 · source: vendor, NVD
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-10678
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-10678
Patch
https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/commit/9e23364261a2188c171d734d6947e02ee2a9510f
Patch
https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/security/advisories/GHSA-pmwm-5rcm-39rr
More from zephyr
10.0
CVE-2023-4260
Potential off-by-one buffer overflow vulnerability in the Zephyr fuse file system
9.8
CVE-2026-13214
Stack buffer overflow in OCPP GetConfiguration key parsing
9.8
CVE-2026-10666
Stack buffer overflow in `net_ipaddr_parse()` IPv4 address-with-port parsing in `subsys/net/ip/utils.c`
9.8
CVE-2026-5067
Out-of-bounds read/write in HTTP WebSocket upgrade via non-null-terminated Sec-WebSocket-Key
9.8
CVE-2026-1678
dns: memory‑safety issue in the DNS name parser
