CVE-2026-19571 Race condition in zephyr
A race condition in the ITE IT8xxx2 SHI backend allows a compromised host to trigger out-of-bounds reads, disclosing memory or causing denial of service.
- 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-2026-19571?
CVE-2026-19571 is a medium-severity vulnerability in zephyrproject zephyr, published on 9 Oct 2026. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
The ITE IT8xxx2 SHI host-command backend (subsys/mgmt/ec_host_cmd/backends/ec_host_cmd_backend_shi_ite.c) copied the 8-byte host-command request header from the SPI Rx FIFO directly into the shared receive buffer data->in_msg and only afterwards checked the protocol version and the derived packet length. The interrupt handler also accepted a chip-select assertion and an Rx-valid-length (RVLI) interrupt in any driver state other than SHI_STATE_DISABLED, so a new header could be parsed while the host-command thread was still processing the previous request out of the very same buffer.
The host processor is the SPI controller and drives both chip select and the clock. After sending a well-formed request it can immediately de-assert chip select — which returns the driver to the ready state and re-enables the FIFO — and start a second transaction carrying a header with data_len = 0xFFFF. Those eight bytes are written into in_msg before the oversized length is rejected, so they land in a buffer whose contents verify_rx() in subsys/mgmt/ec_host_cmd/ec_host_cmd_handler.c has already validated. If this lands in the window before the host-command thread executes args.input_buf_size = rx_header->data_len, the framework hands the registered command handler a 65535-byte input length over a 256-byte buffer.
The result is an out-of-bounds read of up to roughly 64 KiB beyond the request buffer: command handlers that copy or echo input_buf_size bytes disclose adjacent embedded-controller memory back to the host or overflow the response buffer, and a read past the end of SRAM faults the controller. The same race also allows cmd_id and cmd_ver to be swapped after checksum verification and after handler lookup. Exploitation requires the ability to drive the inter-processor SHI bus (a compromised host OS or physical access to the SPI lines) and winning a timing race, which the SPI controller can retry indefinitely.
The fix parses the header into a local struct ec_host_cmd_request_header and copies it into in_msg only after the length has been bounded by sizeof(data->in_msg), and ignores chip-select and RVLI interrupts outside SHI_STATE_READY_TO_RECV/SHI_STATE_RECEIVING. A residual, bounded race remains: an end-of-transaction interrupt still resets the state to ready while the host-command thread owns the buffer, so a valid second request can still overwrite the in-flight request's contents, unlike the NPCX backend which parks in SHI_STATE_CNL_RESP_NOT_RDY while the buffer is in use.
Weakness: CWE-362
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-19571?
How do I fix CVE-2026-19571?
No fix has been published for CVE-2026-19571 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.
Is CVE-2026-19571 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-19571 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as GHSA-4x98-6536-cwjv.