net: airoha: Fix DMA direction for NPU mailbox buffer (Linux Linux)

CVE-2026-68330
HIGH 7.8

At a glance

Source
NVD
EPSS
EPSS 0.16 % · percentile 5 ()
State
PUBLISHED
Published
Updated
Assigner
Linux
NVD status
Received

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: airoha: Fix DMA direction for NPU mailbox buffer airoha_npu_send_msg() always maps the mailbox buffer with DMA_TO_DEVICE, but some callers expect the NPU to write response data back into the same buffer: - airoha_npu_wlan_msg_get() (NPU_OP_GET): NPU writes response into the buffer, then the caller reads it via memcpy() - airoha_npu_ppe_stats_setup() (NPU_OP_SET): NPU writes back npu_stats_addr field in the response On non-cache-coherent architectures like EN7581 (Cortex-A53 without hardware cache coherency for NPU DMA), DMA_TO_DEVICE unmap is a no-op — it does not invalidate the CPU cache. If the NPU-written cache line is still present in the CPU cache when the caller reads the buffer, the CPU observes stale data instead of the NPU response. This is a timing-sensitive bug: small mailbox buffers (~24 bytes) typically fit in a single cache line and may survive in the cache until the caller reads them, producing silent data corruption rather than a crash. The bug is more likely to trigger when the caller reads the response immediately after dma_unmap_single() without intervening cache-evicting operations. Fix by using DMA_BIDIRECTIONAL for both map and unmap, which ensures dma_unmap_single() invalidates the CPU cache on non-coherent systems. The mailbox buffers are small so there is no performance concern.

References

Scores

VersionScoreVectorScored by
CVSS 3.1HIGH 7.8CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:HLinux
CVSS 3.1HIGH 7.8CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:HNVD · 416baaa9-dc9f-4396-8d5f-8c081fb06d67 (Secondary)

European references

CERT-FR advisories

Affected products

ProductVersions
Linux · Linuxaffected c52918744ee1e49cea86622a2633b9782446428f < 76fc5604308a109bf5838c2a0a0eb3ac6819f1ea ; affected c52918744ee1e49cea86622a2633b9782446428f < 4c4d866a64f36718cbcdf20add372a599dd44311 ; affected c52918744ee1e49cea86622a2633b9782446428f < 6f884eb87a79e0c482baef2ad96c96b81d024235
Linux · Linuxaffected 6.16 ; unaffected 0 < 6.16 ; unaffected 6.18.42 ≤ 6.18.* ; unaffected 7.1.6 ≤ 7.1.* ; unaffected 7.2 ≤ *

Sources

SourceLicence
CVE List (CVEProject cvelistV5)CVE Program Terms of Use
EPSS (FIRST.org)FIRST — attribution requested
ENISA EUVDENISA — reproduction authorised, source acknowledged
CERT-FR (ANSSI)Licence Ouverte / Etalab 2.0
NVD (NIST) via fkie-cad/nvd-json-data-feedsPublic domain — this product uses data from the NVD API but is not endorsed or certified by the NVD