CVE-2026-10683 DesignWare I2C target driver can be wedged into a permanent stuck state by an on-bus master (DoS)
An I2C master can permanently wedge the DesignWare I2C target driver, causing a denial of service for the target peripheral.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- None listed
What is CVE-2026-10683?
CVE-2026-10683 is a low-severity denial of service vulnerability in Zephyrproject Zephyr, published on 27 Jul 2026. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
In the Synopsys DesignWare I2C driver (drivers/i2c/i2c_dw.c) operating in target/slave mode, the rx_full interrupt handler gates the write_requested() callback on dw->state != CMD_SEND, and dw->state is only reset to READY on a STOP interrupt. The START_DET interrupt, whose handler in i2c_dw_slave_read_clear_intr_bits() would reset the state on every (re)START, was never added to the enabled interrupt mask in i2c_dw_slave_register(), so that recovery path was dead code.
As a result, if the STOP interrupt is lost (bus glitch/reset, or a concurrent master driving STOP) or the bus master issues a legal WRITE-repeated-START-WRITE sequence with the same direction, the driver remains in CMD_SEND permanently and never invokes write_requested() again for the life of the target.
An I2C master on the same physical bus can deliberately trigger this, causing the I2C target function to malfunction for all subsequent write transactions and desynchronizing consumer framing state (e.g. MCTP-over-I2C), a recoverable-by-reset denial of service of the target peripheral.
The fix unmasks START_DET so the state is reset at every bus (re)START. Impact is availability-only over a local board-level bus; no memory corruption results in the in-tree consumer, whose per-byte buffer write is independently bounds-checked.
Weakness: CWE-835
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-10683?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Zephyrproject Zephyr.
How do I fix CVE-2026-10683?
No fix has been published for CVE-2026-10683 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.
Is CVE-2026-10683 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-10683 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Zephyrproject Zephyr
- CVE-2026-5067 Out-of-bounds read/write in HTTP WebSocket upgrade via non-null-terminated Sec-WebSocket-Key
- CVE-2022-3806 Bluetooth HCI Error Handling Double Free
- CVE-2017-14199 Memory corruption in getaddrinfo
- CVE-2018-1000800 Null dereference in n/a
- CVE-2021-3329 DOS: Incorrect handling of the initial HCI ACL_MTU handshake packet leads to crash of bluetooth host layer
Sources
Also known as GHSA-fj9c-r5qw-3639.