Medium severity · published Oct 1, 2026
CVE-2026-17053
SMBus callback-removal syscalls accept an unvalidated user pointer, letting user threads manipulate kernel callback state
4.4
CVSS
0.1%
EPSS
No
On KEV
Description
The SMBus driver API exposed smbus_smbalert_remove_cb() and smbus_host_notify_remove_cb() as Zephyr syscalls. Their verifiers in drivers/smbus/smbus_handlers.c validated only the dev argument with K_SYSCALL_OBJ(dev, K_OBJ_DRIVER_SMBUS) and forwarded the caller-supplied struct smbus_callback *cb pointer into kernel-mode driver code without any K_SYSCALL_MEMORY_READ/K_SYSCALL_MEMORY_WRITE validation. A companion change in 2023 had already removed the matching smbus_smbalert_set_cb() / smbus_host_notify_set_cb() syscalls for this reason, but the two removal syscalls were left exposed.
On a build with CONFIG_USERSPACE=y, CONFIG_SMBUS=y and a driver implementing the callback operations (drivers/smbus/intel_pch_smbus.c with CONFIG_SMBUS_INTEL_PCH_SMBALERT/CONFIG_SMBUS_INTEL_PCH_HOST_NOTIFY, or drivers/smbus/smbus_stm32.c with CONFIG_SMBUS_STM32_SMBALERT), any user-mode thread that has been granted the SMBus device object can invoke these syscalls with an arbitrary pointer. The value reaches smbus_callback_remove() in drivers/smbus/smbus_utils.h, which uses it as a node identity against the kernel's sys_slist_t of registered callbacks.
The consequence is that an unprivileged thread can unregister an SMBALERT or Host Notify callback that a supervisor-mode component registered, silently disabling alert handling for the rest of the system; because Zephyr images have fixed symbol addresses and the syscall returns 0 on a hit versus -ENOENT on a miss, the target address is both derivable and searchable. In builds with CONFIG_ASSERT=y the __ASSERT(callback->handler, ...) check additionally dereferences the caller-supplied address in supervisor mode, so a bogus pointer raises a kernel-mode fault and a fatal system error, and the fault/no-fault outcome discloses which addresses are mapped.
The fix removes both syscall entry points, demoting the two functions to ordinary static inline calls so that callback list manipulation is available only to supervisor-mode code. There is no impact on builds without CONFIG_USERSPACE, and no impact on configurations that do not enable an SMBus driver with SMBALERT or Host Notify support.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:L
Attack vector
Local
Complexity
Low
Privileges
Low
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
Low
Availability
Low
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.1% · higher than 0% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
ZE
zephyr · zephyrproject
3.4.0 before 4.4.2 · source: vendor
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-17053
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-17053
patch
https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/commit/331df881a8b8cb4296699a8251c9fd74a4308f3d
github.com
https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/security/advisories/GHSA-hqh5-956f-5x2r
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