CVE-2026-10640

Zephyr's IPv6 Neighbor Discovery send paths (netipv6sendna, netipv6sendns, netipv6sendrs in subsys/net/ip/ipv6nbr.c) updated the per-interface ICMP-sent statistics by calling netpktiface(pkt) after netsenddata(pkt) had already returned successfully. On the success path the network stack owns and releases the packet's reference (the L2/driver send unrefs it, e.g. ethernetsend - netpktunref), so for a freshly allocated packet with refcount 1 the netpkt slab block can be freed before the statistics line runs (synchronously when no TX queue thread is configured, or via a concurrent TX thread otherwise).

The subsequent netpktiface(pkt) reads pkt-iface from the freed slab block, and with CONFIGNETSTATISTICSPERINTERFACE enabled that loaded pointer is dereferenced to increment iface-stats.icmp.sent, a use-after-free (CWE-416). If the slab block was reallocated in the meantime the read/increment targets unrelated or attacker-influenced memory, yielding corrupted statistics, a fault/crash (denial of service), or potential limited memory corruption.

The vulnerable Neighbor Advertisement path is reachable by any unauthenticated on-link node simply by sending ICMPv6 Neighbor Solicitations to a Zephyr node with native IPv6 enabled (handlensinput - netipv6send_na).

Affected from v3.3.0 through v4.4.0; the fix uses the already-available iface argument instead of touching the sent packet. Configurations without per-interface statistics dereference only a global counter and are not affected by the memory-safety aspect.