CVE-2026-12999 (GCVE-0-2026-12999)
Vulnerability from cvelistv5 – Published: 2026-08-22 20:35 – Updated: 2026-08-22 20:35
VLAI
EPSS
VEX
Title
Infineon Airoc Wi-Fi driver leaks TX buffers on send failure, leading to permanent pool exhaustion
Summary
The Infineon Airoc Wi-Fi driver's transmit callback airoc_mgmt_send() in drivers/wifi/infineon/airoc_wifi.c allocates a net_buf from the fixed airoc_pool for every outbound packet. When whd_network_send_ethernet_data() returns a synchronous failure, the underlying WHD library does not take ownership of the buffer, but the pre-fix driver returned -EIO without releasing it. Each failed transmit therefore permanently leaks one buffer from the pool.
airoc_pool is small and fixed (AIROC_WIFI_TX_PACKET_POOL_COUNT + AIROC_WIFI_RX_PACKET_POOL_COUNT, default 20 buffers) and is shared by WHD's whd_host_buffer_get callback for both transmit and receive. Once enough send failures have leaked the pool dry, airoc_wifi_host_buffer_get() returns WHD_BUFFER_ALLOC_FAIL for all subsequent allocations, so both transmit and the WHD-driven receive path fail and Wi-Fi connectivity is lost until the device is rebooted.
The leak occurs only on the transmit error path. A Wi-Fi-adjacent attacker can influence the conditions that cause synchronous send failures (for example by deauthenticating/disassociating the station while the local stack continues to attempt transmits), and ordinary transient failures over the device's lifetime accumulate toward the same state. Reliable on-demand triggering is of high complexity and the impact is availability-only, but the resulting denial of service is permanent and non-recoverable without a reboot.
The fix releases the buffer with airoc_wifi_buffer_release() on the failure branch, returning it to the pool. The commit also removes a redundant k_sem_give() in airoc_mgmt_disconnect(); because data->sema_common is a binary semaphore (limit 1) the duplicate give merely saturated at 1 and had no security impact.
Severity
5.3 (Medium)
CWE
- CWE-401 - dos
Assigner
References
2 references
Impacted products
1 product
| Vendor | Product | Version | CPE status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| zephyrproject | zephyr |
Affected:
3.6.0 , < 4.4.2
(semver)
|
guessed |
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}
}
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Forecast uses a logistic model when the trend is rising, or an exponential decay model when the trend is falling. Fitted via linearized least squares.
Sightings
| Author | Source | Type | Date | Other |
|---|
Nomenclature
- Seen: The vulnerability was mentioned, discussed, or observed by the user.
- Confirmed: The vulnerability has been validated from an analyst's perspective.
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- Not exploited: The vulnerability was not observed as exploited by the user who reported the sighting.
- Not confirmed: The user expressed doubt about the validity of the vulnerability.
- Not patched: The vulnerability was not observed as successfully patched by the user who reported the sighting.
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The MITRE ATT&CK techniques below are AI-generated suggestions, inferred from the description of the
vulnerability by the CIRCL/vulnerability-attack-technique-classification-roberta-base
model, served locally by ML-Gateway.
They have not been verified by an analyst and are provided for guidance only.
The approach is described in our paper Mapping CVEs to MITRE ATT&CK Techniques: A Curated Gold-Set Classifier and the Limits of LLM-Assisted Label Expansion.
The approach is described in our paper Mapping CVEs to MITRE ATT&CK Techniques: A Curated Gold-Set Classifier and the Limits of LLM-Assisted Label Expansion.
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