{
  "schemaVersion": 1,
  "attribution": [
    {
      "source": "CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities",
      "url": "https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog",
      "licence": "US government work"
    },
    {
      "source": "GitHub Advisory Database",
      "url": "https://github.com/advisories",
      "licence": "CC BY 4.0"
    },
    {
      "source": "Have I Been Pwned",
      "url": "https://haveibeenpwned.com/",
      "licence": "CC BY 4.0"
    },
    {
      "source": "CVE Program (CVE records)",
      "url": "https://www.cve.org/Legal/TermsOfUse",
      "licence": "CVE Terms of Use",
      "notice": "Copyright © 1999-2026, The MITRE Corporation. CVE is a trademark and the CVE logo is a registered trademark of The MITRE Corporation.",
      "terms": "CVE Usage: MITRE hereby grants you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE™). Any copy you make for such purposes is authorized provided that you reproduce MITRE's copyright designation and this license in any such copy."
    },
    {
      "source": "FIRST EPSS",
      "url": "https://www.first.org/epss/",
      "licence": "free to use; FIRST requests attribution"
    }
  ],
  "record": {
    "id": "CVE-2026-78118",
    "sourceURL": "https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-78118",
    "idYear": 2026,
    "status": "PUBLISHED",
    "publishedAt": "2026-10-21T18:19:32.200Z",
    "updatedAt": "2026-10-23T21:28:10.701Z",
    "importedAt": "2026-10-24T01:58:30.346Z",
    "snapshot": {
      "id": "cve_2026-10-24_midnight_baseline",
      "at": "2026-10-24T00:00:00.000Z",
      "source": "https://github.com/CVEProject/cvelistV5/releases/tag/cve_2026-10-24_0100Z"
    },
    "facts": {
      "title": "Race condition on kernel wait queues: unlocked z_waitq_head() read in the timer expiration handler can yield a stale or sentinel thread pointer on SMP",
      "summary": "The kernel helper z_waitq_head() (kernel/include/wait_q.h) reads the head of a thread wait queue, but on SMP systems it was called from several places without holding the scheduler spinlock _sched_spinlock that serializes wait-queue mutation. The consequential call site is z_timer_expiration_handler() in kernel/timer.c, which held only the timer subsystem lock timer_lock while reading timer->wait_q and then unpending, setting the return value of, and readying the thread it obtained. halt_thread() in kernel/sched.c removes an aborted thread from its wait queue while holding only _sched_spinlock, so the two paths are not mutually exclusive.\n\nWhen the last waiter is removed on another CPU inside that window, sys_dlist_peek_head() can return the list sentinel — a pointer into the k_timer object itself — typed as a struct k_thread * (with CONFIG_WAITQ_SCALABLE, rb_get_min() can return an arbitrary node of a tree being restructured), or it can return a pointer to a thread that has already been unpended and, for dynamically allocated threads, freed. The handler then calls unpend_thread_no_timeout(), which performs a sys_dlist_remove() through pointers read from that object, and arch_thread_return_value_set(), which writes unconditionally through the pointer.\n\nThe result is out-of-bounds and use-after-free writes in supervisor context, plus scheduler state corruption; a milder outcome is a thread that has re-pended elsewhere being woken with a success return value from an unrelated blocking call. All of the primitives needed to drive the interleaving — k_timer_start(), k_timer_status_sync(), k_thread_create() and k_thread_abort() — are system calls, so with CONFIG_USERSPACE enabled an unprivileged user-mode thread can attempt the race against kernel-owned data.\n\nExploitation requires a multi-CPU build (CONFIG_MP_MAX_NUM_CPUS greater than one; the affected region is a no-op on uniprocessor targets), local code execution, and winning a narrow timing window, so the practical outcome is most often a kernel crash rather than controlled corruption. The fix splits the helper into z_waitq_head_locked() for callers that already hold the scheduler spinlock and a z_waitq_head() that acquires it, and brings the timer expiration handler's head read, unpend and ready under a single LOCK_SCHED_SPINLOCK region.",
      "affected": [
        {
          "vendor": "zephyrproject",
          "product": "zephyr",
          "packageName": "zephyr",
          "collectionURL": "https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr",
          "defaultStatus": "unaffected",
          "versions": [
            {
              "version": "2.2.0",
              "status": "affected",
              "versionType": "semver",
              "lessThan": "4.5.0"
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}