CVE-2026-18748
Received
Received - Intake
Buffer Overflow in Zephyr RTOS Bluetooth A2DP Stack
Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-18748, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.
Publication date: 2026-10-21
Last updated on: 2026-10-21
Assigner: Zephyr Project
Description
Description
The Bluetooth Classic A2DP host stores a codec Information Element (IE) in struct bt_a2dp_codec_ie, a one-byte len field plus a fixed 8-byte codec_ie[] array. When an AVDTP peer sent a codec IE longer than 8 bytes, a2dp_process_config_ind() in subsys/bluetooth/host/classic/a2dp.c copied only the first 8 bytes but assigned the full, attacker-chosen length to len, and then persisted that inconsistent structure into the application's struct bt_a2dp_stream via stream->codec_config. bt_a2dp_get_config_cb() and bt_a2dp_set_config_cb() had the same truncate-the-copy-but-keep-the-length pattern.
Every later consumer trusts len. In particular the responder for an incoming AVDTP GET_CONFIGURATION, a2dp_get_config_ind(), executes net_buf_add_mem(rsp_buf, &ep->stream->codec_config.codec_ie[0], ep->stream->codec_config.len), so a paired BR/EDR peer that first sends a SET_CONFIGURATION carrying an oversized codec IE and then requests the configuration back causes the stack to read up to roughly 245 bytes past the end of the 8-byte array and transmit them in the response. codec_config is the last member of struct bt_a2dp_stream, so the read runs into memory adjacent to the application's stream object. The same inconsistency is also handed to the config_req(), reconfig_req() and get_config_rsp() application callbacks, where a natural memcpy() of len bytes performs a further out-of-bounds read.
Reaching the on-air disclosure requires CONFIG_BT_CLASSIC with CONFIG_BT_A2DP, an AVDTP peer that has completed pairing (the AVDTP L2CAP channel requires BT_SECURITY_L2), and a local endpoint registered for a non-SBC codec — BT_A2DP_MPEG1/BT_A2DP_MPEG2/BT_A2DP_ATRAC/BT_A2DP_VENDOR via BT_A2DP_EP_INIT() — because the SBC branch already pins the IE length to 4 bytes. The bt_a2dp_get_config_cb() response path has no such gate and hands the lying length to any application. There is no out-of-bounds write: the net_buf tailroom check bounds the destination, so the impact is limited to disclosure of a bounded region of adjacent RAM to the peer.
The fix replaces the hardcoded BT_A2DP_MAX_IE_LENGTH with the configurable CONFIG_BT_A2DP_CODEC_MAX_IE_LEN (default 8, range 4–253), sizes codec_ie[] from it, and rejects any received IE that exceeds it instead of silently truncating, so len can no longer exceed the number of valid bytes.
CVSS Scores
EPSS Scores
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Meta Information
Affected Vendors & Products
| Vendor | Product | Version / Range |
|---|---|---|
| zephyrproject | zephyr | 4.3.0 |
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
KEV
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-125 | The product reads data past the end, or before the beginning, of the intended buffer. |
