CVE-2026-11368
PoC massUse-after-free in Zephyr RTOS Bluetooth ATT layer enables remote DoS
CVE-2026-11368 is a use-after-free (CWE-416) in the Bluetooth host ATT layer of the Zephyr RTOS (subsys/bluetooth/host/att.c), where each in-flight ATT TX buffer stores a pointer to its owning channel in a static metadata array (tx_meta_data_storage[]) that is never cleared when the channel is torn down. A remote Bluetooth peer can trigger the bug by disconnecting while an ATT PDU (a notification, indication, or response) is still in flight in the controller TX path; no pairing or user interaction is required to reach the ATT bearer. The deferred buffer-destroy work then dereferences the now-dangling channel pointer, reliably crashing the Bluetooth host (denial of service) and potentially corrupting live memory if the freed channel slab slot has been reused. Any device running Zephyr firmware with the Bluetooth host stack and ATT enabled is affected, a population that includes many Bluetooth Low Energy products built on Zephyr-based vendor SDKs. No in-the-wild exploitation is known (EPSS 0.3%, not in CISA KEV), but a public advisory with a proof-of-concept reference (GHSA-85vg-gwc4-77g7) has been published by the Zephyr Project.
What to do: Rebuild and re-flash affected devices with a Zephyr release that includes the fix referenced in GHSA-85vg-gwc4-77g7 (bt_att_released() now clears stale tx_meta_data_storage[] channel references before the slab slot is freed); no fixed version number is given in the available data, so verify the fix commit against the upstream advisory. Check whether your firmware build enables Zephyr's Bluetooth host (CONFIG_BT) with ATT/GATT; if Bluetooth is unused, disable it, and as an interim measure limit BLE peripheral exposure since no pairing or user interaction is needed to trigger the crash.
| Zephyr Project Zephyr | — |
Order-of-magnitude estimate by the model from install counts, market share and public scan data it knows; verify before quoting.
The Bluetooth host ATT layer (subsys/bluetooth/host/att.c) associates each in-flight ATT TX buffer with its owning channel via the static tx_meta_data_storage[] array (data->att_chan = chan). When a buffer's last reference is dropped, its net-buf destroy callback defers the completion handling to the system workqueue (att_tx_destroy -> att_tx_destroy_work_handler -> att_on_sent_cb -> bt_att_sent), where bt_att_sent dereferences the channel and its ATT context (sys_slist_get(&att->reqs)). When a peer disconnects while an ATT PDU (a server notification/indication or any response) is still in flight in the controller TX path, L2CAP tears the channel down in l2cap_chan_del(): it runs the disconnected callback and then the released callback (bt_att_released), which frees the channel slab slot. Because the in-flight buffer is held by the connection TX path rather than the channel's own queue, its deferred destroy work can run after the channel has been freed. The att_on_sent_cb guard intended to drop the stale callback itself dereferences meta->att_chan, which is now a dangling pointer into a freed (and possibly reused) slab slot. A remote peer with an ATT connection can drive this by disconnecting during routine ATT traffic; no pairing or user interaction is required to reach the ATT bearer. The result is a use-after-free read/write of freed channel memory, reliably crashing the Bluetooth host (denial of service) and, because the channel slab slot may be reused, potentially corrupting live memory. The fix makes bt_att_released() NULL the att_chan field of every tx_meta_data_storage[] entry still referencing the channel before freeing it, so the deferred guard observes a NULL pointer and drops the callback. Teardown and the destroy work both run on the cooperative system workqueue, so the array update is serialized and needs no lock.
- Vendors
- zephyrproject
- Products
- zephyr
- Weakness
- CWE-416
- Vector
- CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
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