Medium severity · published Sep 21, 2026
CVE-2026-17051
Out-of-bounds write in the Intel SEDI IPM driver from an unvalidated inbound doorbell length
6.0
CVSS
0.2%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
The Intel SEDI IPM (inter-processor mailbox) driver in drivers/ipm/ipm_sedi.c handles an inbound message interrupt in ipm_event_dispose(). It read the peer-written doorbell register, extracted the payload length with IPC_HEADER_GET_LENGTH(), and passed that length straight to sedi_ipc_read_msg() to copy the message into struct ipm_sedi_context.incoming_data_buf, without checking it against the buffer size. The doorbell length field is 10 bits wide (IPC_HEADER_LENGTH_MASK is 0x03FF), so it can encode up to 1023 bytes, while incoming_data_buf is IPC_DATA_LEN_MAX (128) bytes. The bounds check in the underlying HAL sedi_ipc_read_msg() is a DBG_CHECK that compiles away unless CONFIG_DEBUG is set, so no check remained in a production image.
The doorbell register is written by the peer processor on the other side of the IPC link — for the intel_ish_5_* targets, the host CPU's ISH driver, reached through the device's memory-mapped register window. Host-side software with driver-level or raw BAR access can therefore set a length of up to 1023 and cause the interrupt handler to copy far past the destination buffer. The affected path requires an application to have registered an IPM receive callback via ipm_register_callback(), which is the driver's normal mode of use.
The result is an out-of-bounds write of up to 895 bytes into static (.bss) memory, performed in interrupt context. The overflow first clobbers the rest of struct ipm_sedi_context — including the k_sem and k_mutex used by the transmit path, whose wait queues contain self-referential list pointers — and then adjacent static data, giving a kernel data-structure corruption and crash primitive. The overflowing bytes are read from registers following the message window, a portion of which are themselves peer-programmable. The fix rejects any doorbell whose encoded length exceeds IPC_DATA_LEN_MAX, logging it and acknowledging the doorbell so the peer is not left waiting.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:H
Attack vector
Local
Complexity
Low
Privileges
High
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
High
Availability
High
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.2% · higher than 5% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
ZE
zephyr · zephyrproject
3.5.0 before 4.4.2 · source: vendor
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-17051
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-17051
github.com
https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/commit/74c7d27925055e8c3c8aef7a9f16cae6a8c64b70
github.com
https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/security/advisories/GHSA-78p3-4gv3-qjh9
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