Medium severity · published Aug 11, 2026
CVE-2026-11893
Double free / use-after-free in Bouffalo Lab HCI driver send() error paths (hci_bflb)
5.9
CVSS
0.2%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
The Bluetooth HCI driver for Bouffalo Lab on-chip BLE controllers (BL60x/BL70x/BL61x), bt_bflb_send() in drivers/bluetooth/hci/hci_bflb.c, violates the bt_hci_driver_api.send() buffer-ownership contract. That contract (documented at include/zephyr/drivers/bluetooth.h) requires the buffer reference to be consumed only on success; on error the caller still owns the reference and unrefs it. The driver instead routed all error paths through a shared label that unconditionally called net_buf_unref(buf) before returning the error code, consuming the buffer on failure as well.
When send() returns an error, the host TX path (send_buf() in subsys/bluetooth/host/conn.c) unrefs the same buffer again, believing it still owns it. This double-unref over-decrements the net_buf reference count. Because the buffer is a TX fragment whose destroy callback also decrements its still-queued parent buffer, the parent is freed prematurely while reachable on the connection TX queue, producing a use-after-free and corruption of the shared net_buf pool rather than a benign leak.
The error conditions are on the host-to-controller transmit path (controller send failure, or an unsupported H:4 packet type), so they are not driven directly by attacker-supplied radio bytes; a remote/adjacent peer can influence them only indirectly, e.g. by inducing controller TX failures under heavy link load. The consequence when reached is BLE-stack denial of service (crash / pool corruption) with possible further memory corruption, bounded to devices using one of these Bouffalo Lab on-chip controllers.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:H
Attack vector
Adjacent
Complexity
High
Privileges
None
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
Low
Availability
High
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.2% · higher than 16% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
ZE
zephyr · zephyrproject
4.4.0 before 4.4.2 · source: vendor
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-11893
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-11893
github.com
https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/commit/76d92d502b30218aaf11cbbe1be180a317627bb9
github.com
https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/security/advisories/GHSA-ph42-6rqx-728c
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