CVE-2026-72141
Received
Received - Intake
I2C Bus Locking in Linux Kernel SMBus
Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-72141, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.
Publication date: 2026-08-15
Last updated on: 2026-08-15
Assigner: kernel.org
Description
Description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
i2c: imx: fix locked bus on SMBus block-read of 0 (IRQ)
SMBus 3.1 6.5.7 allows a Block Read byte count of 0, but the
interrupt-driven block-read state machine rejects it as -EPROTO. Worse,
it returns without a NACK+STOP: the next receive cycle has already
started, so the target keeps holding SDA and the bus stays stuck until a
power cycle of this i2c controller.
Accept count=0: NACK the in-flight dummy byte (TXAK) and set msg->len to
2 so i2c_imx_isr_read_continue() emits STOP via its normal last-byte
path. The dummy byte is discarded; block-read callers only consume
buf[0..count-1].
Reading I2DR has likewise already armed the next byte on the
count > I2C_SMBUS_BLOCK_MAX error path, so NACK it (TXAK) before aborting
with -EPROTO; otherwise the failing transfer's STOP cannot complete and
the bus stays held.
The atomic path regressed earlier (v3.16) and is fixed separately; this
patch covers only the v6.13 state-machine rework.
CVSS Scores
EPSS Scores
| Probability: | |
| Percentile: |
Meta Information
Affected Vendors & Products
| Vendor | Product | Version / Range |
|---|---|---|
| linux | linux_kernel | 6.13 |
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
KEV
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-UNKNOWN |
