DoS (hard fault) in NXP LPUART driver: unsupported runtime UART config leaves clocks disabled
13Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 5.5epss 0.1%
exploitation probability
0.1%top 99% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
The NXP LPUART serial driver (drivers/serial/uart_mcux_lpuart.c), when CONFIG_UART_USE_RUNTIME_CONFIGURE is enabled, called LPUART_Deinit() at the start of mcux_lpuart_configure(), which disables the LPUART peripheral clocks. The requested configuration is validated only afterwards (in mcux_lpuart_configure_basic), and unsupported parity/data-bit/stop-bit/flow-control values return -ENOTSUP before the clock is re-enabled.
As a result, a uart_configure() request with an unsupported configuration left the LPUART in a clock-disabled state; any subsequent access to LPUART registers (poll_out/poll_in, interrupt handling, or a later reconfigure) faults on the gated peripheral and escalates to a hard fault, crashing the system.
uart_configure() is a Zephyr syscall whose verifier (z_vrfy_uart_configure) only checks that cfg is readable user memory and forwards the caller-supplied configuration unchanged, so an unprivileged userspace thread with access to an LPUART device can deterministically trigger the fault, a persistent system-wide denial of service.
Introduced in v2.5.0 and present in all subsequent releases until this fix, which removes the LPUART_Deinit() call and instead only disables the transmitter/receiver, leaving the clock running.
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Affected products
zephyrproject · zephyr