Medium severity · published Aug 31, 2026
CVE-2026-14368
Off-by-one out-of-bounds NUL write in Zephyr LwM2M JSON string parser
5.4
CVSS
0.4%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
The LwM2M JSON content formatter's get_string() in subsys/net/lib/lwm2m/lwm2m_rw_json.c copies a parsed JSON string into a caller-supplied buffer and NUL-terminates it. The length guard used if (string_length > buflen), which accepts a string whose length is exactly buflen. After memcpy() fills the whole buffer, buf[string_length] = '\0' then writes one byte past the end of the buffer (CWE-787).
The string value and its length are taken directly from the incoming CoAP payload during a LwM2M WRITE: do_write_op_json() parses the payload obtained from coap_packet_get_payload(), and get_string() is invoked from lwm2m_write_handler() (engine_get_string() in subsys/net/lib/lwm2m/lwm2m_message_handling.c) for a LWM2M_RES_TYPE_STRING resource. The destination buf/buflen is either the resource instance's fixed data buffer (res_inst->data_ptr/max_data_len) or the engine validation buffer (msg->ctx->validate_buf). A LwM2M server (the client's DTLS peer) can therefore write a string resource with a value whose length equals the target buffer size and force a one-byte overflow.
The overflow is a single out-of-bounds write of the constant byte 0x00 immediately past the resource or validation buffer, corrupting the adjacent byte in memory. It is not an information leak and the written value is fixed, so it is not a direct code-execution primitive, but it can corrupt adjacent state (an adjacent resource value, a length/flag field, or a struct field) and cause data corruption or a crash. Triggering the write is deterministic; the resulting impact depends on memory layout.
The fix changes the guard to string_length >= buflen, rejecting the exact-length case and aligning the JSON formatter with the other content formatters (lwm2m_rw_plain_text.c, lwm2m_rw_oma_tlv.c, lwm2m_rw_senml_json.c, lwm2m_rw_cbor.c, lwm2m_rw_senml_cbor.c), which already used the correct boundary check.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:L
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
Low
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
Low
Availability
Low
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.4% · higher than 32% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
ZE
zephyr · zephyrproject
3.2.0 before 4.4.2 · source: vendor
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-14368
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-14368
github.com
https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/commit/ba38f4b94337cc2c2446277ac181bdb5fec8f2b2
github.com
https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/security/advisories/GHSA-vg53-h6qq-xx7h
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
