CVE-2026-13735
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WireGuard Keepalive Packet Authentication Bypass in Zephyr RTOS
Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-13735, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.
Publication date: 2026-08-28
Last updated on: 2026-09-01
Assigner: Zephyr Project
Description
Description
Zephyr's WireGuard implementation in subsys/net/lib/wireguard/wg_crypto.c mishandled keepalive packets. In wg_process_data_message(), any type-4 transport-data message whose payload was exactly 16 bytes (an empty plaintext plus a bare Poly1305 tag, i.e. a keepalive) was accepted and returned immediately, before wg_decrypt_packet() was ever called. The Poly1305 authentication tag was therefore never verified; the only preceding gates were a cleartext receiver-index lookup (get_peer_keypair_for_index() on the attacker-supplied data_hdr->receiver) and a non-cryptographic keypair validity/expiry check.
The path is reachable entirely from the network: inbound UDP on the WireGuard port is dispatched by wg_input() to handle_transport_data() and then wg_process_data_message(). The 32-bit receiver index is transmitted in cleartext in WireGuard handshake and data messages, so an on-path observer learns it directly and an off-path attacker can brute-force it against the UDP port. Given an active receiving-valid session for that index, an attacker could send a 16-byte garbage payload and have it accepted without possessing the session key.
On acceptance the unauthenticated message caused the management layer to observe a spoofed NET_EVENT_VPN_CONNECTED signal (setting peer->first_valid and notifying any net_mgmt listener) and incremented the keepalive-RX statistic. The impact is limited to integrity of this status signal: no plaintext is decrypted or injected, no key is disclosed, and the early-return path did not update the peer endpoint or liveness timers, so there is no traffic-injection, session-takeover, or availability consequence.
The fix removes the pre-decrypt early return so a 16-byte payload flows through wg_decrypt_packet(), which verifies the Poly1305 tag over the empty plaintext, followed by the existing anti-replay check; only an authenticated, non-replayed message is then recognised as a keepalive. Forged keepalives now fail the tag check and are counted as decrypt failures.
CVSS Scores
EPSS Scores
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Meta Information
Affected Vendors & Products
| Vendor | Product | Version / Range |
|---|---|---|
| zephyr | wireguard | to 16 (exc) |
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
KEV
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-290 | This attack-focused weakness is caused by incorrectly implemented authentication schemes that are subject to spoofing attacks. |
