Answer in brief
CVE-2026-10642 records a Medium severity (CVSS 4.6) vulnerability in Unbounded TX busy-loop DoS in Zephyr PL011 UART driver under CTS hardware flow control. The current sources do not mark it as known exploited. The current feed maps zephyrproject/zephyr (generic), zephyrproject/zephyr (generic). Check affected ranges and fixed versions before updating.
Analysis pending evidence review
HOL Guard separates source facts from reviewed analysis. See the methodology.
CVSS is 4.6. The current sources do not mark it as known exploited. Treat this as a source-backed prioritization signal, not a statement about your environment.
Analysis status
Analysis pending evidence review
Factual feed record only; HOL analysis is not approved for indexing. Read the methodology.
The current feed maps zephyrproject/zephyr (generic), zephyrproject/zephyr (generic). Check affected ranges and fixed versions before updating.
| Product | Affected versions | Fixed versions |
|---|---|---|
| cpe:2.3:o:zephyrproject:zephyr:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:* | Not reported | Not reported |
| Package | Affected range | Fixed version |
|---|---|---|
| zephyrproject/zephyrgeneric | >=4.1.0 <4.5.0 | 4.5.0 |
| zephyrproject/zephyrgeneric | >=4.1.0 <4.3.1 || >=4.4.0 <4.4.2 | 4.3.1, 4.4.2 |
Published upstream
Jun 24, 2026
Evidence: source:cvelist:source_dates:source-dates:recordSource modified
Oct 25, 2026
Evidence: source:cvelist:source_dates:source-dates:recordFirst seen by HOL
Jun 24, 2026
The Zephyr PL011 UART driver (drivers/serial/uart_pl011.c) contains an unbounded software loop in pl011_irq_tx_enable() that repeatedly invokes the interrupt-driven application callback while the TX interrupt mask bit (PL011_IMSC_TXIM) is set, to work around the controller's level-transition TX-interrupt behavior. When CTS hardware flow control is enabled (devicetree hw-flow-control or runtime UART_CFG_FLOW_CTRL_RTS_CTS) and the wired serial peer de-asserts CTS, the controller stops draining the TX FIFO; pl011_fifo_fill() then returns 0 on every call while the application still has pending data and therefore never disables the TX interrupt. The loop condition never clears, so the thread that called uart_irq_tx_enable() (e.g. h4_send() in the Bluetooth HCI H4 driver) spins indefinitely, hanging the executing context and stalling the transport — a denial of service (CWE-835). An attacker controlling the device attached to the UART's CTS line can trigger the hang by withholding CTS during transmission. Because that peer is the device wired to the UART — which may be a removable or external module (e.g. an off-board Bluetooth controller on the HCI H4 link) rather than a permanently-bonded on-PCB part — the attack vector is scored Adjacent (AV:A) rather than Physical; the security subcommittee should confirm the vector against the specific deployment. Impact is availability only; there is no memory-safety, confidentiality, or integrity consequence. The vulnerable loop was introduced in commit b783bc8448ef (Feb 2025) and shipped in releases v4.1.0 through v4.4.0. The fix breaks out of the loop when CTS is blocking and arms the CTS modem-status interrupt to resume transmission when CTS re-asserts.
Quoted source text, attributed separately from HOL analysis.