CVE-2026-11985
Received
Received - Intake
Hardware FPU Context Switch Information Disclosure in Zephyr RTOS
Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-11985, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.
Publication date: 2026-08-11
Last updated on: 2026-08-11
Assigner: Zephyr Project
Description
Description
On the Zephyr ARM port, enabling the hardware FPU (CONFIG_FPU) forces the "Floating point ABI" choice, which defaults to CONFIG_FP_HARDABI. Both FP_HARDABI and FP_SOFTABI permit the compiler to emit hardware FP instructions in any function, even code that never uses floating-point types. However, the callee-saved FP registers (s16-s31 / d8-d15) are only saved and restored across a context switch when CONFIG_FPU_SHARING is enabled (arch/arm/core/cortex_m/swap_helper.S and arch/arm/core/cortex_a_r/swap_helper.S), and prior to this fix selecting an ABI did not enable FPU register sharing, which defaults off.
In a build that enables the FPU with the default ABI but leaves CONFIG_FPU_SHARING disabled, the kernel preserves no callee-saved FP register state across thread switches. The documented precondition for this "unshared" mode — that only a single thread ever executes FP instructions — is silently violated because the compiler may generate FP instructions in every thread.
Under CONFIG_USERSPACE, where threads are mutually isolated, this becomes an information-disclosure boundary crossing: a victim thread can leave secret-derived values in s16-s31, and a co-resident unprivileged thread can read those registers directly (FP register access is not privilege-gated), recovering data left behind by another thread. Without userspace the same defect causes cross-thread FP state corruption (a correctness fault). The leak is bounded to the 16 callee-saved single-precision registers and is opportunistic, so impact is low.
The fix makes FP_HARDABI and FP_SOFTABI select CONFIG_FPU_SHARING and tags every thread with K_FP_REGS at creation, so callee-saved FP state is always preserved across context switches whenever the compiler may emit FP instructions.
CVSS Scores
EPSS Scores
| Probability: | |
| Percentile: |
Meta Information
Affected Vendors & Products
| Vendor | Product | Version / Range |
|---|---|---|
| zephyrproject | zephyr | From 1.13.0 (inc) to 4.4.1 (inc) |
| zephyrproject | zephyr | 4.5.0 |
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
KEV
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-200 | The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information. |
