ZephyrProject Zephyr up to 4.4.2 WireGuard wg.c handle_transport_data redirect

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability described as problematic has been identified in ZephyrProject Zephyr up to 4.4.2. Affected is the function handle_transport_data of the file subsys/net/lib/wireguard/wg.c of the component WireGuard. The manipulation results in redirect. This vulnerability was named CVE-2026-79977. The attack may be performed from remote. There is no available exploit. A patch should be applied to remediate this issue.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability, which was classified as problematic, was found in ZephyrProject Zephyr up to 4.4.2. Affected is the function handle_transport_data of the file subsys/net/lib/wireguard/wg.c of the component WireGuard. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a redirect vulnerability. CWE is classifying the issue as CWE-601. A web application accepts a user-controlled input that specifies a link to an external site, and uses that link in a Redirect. This simplifies phishing attacks. This is going to have an impact on integrity. CVE summarizes:

The WireGuard VPN service in subsys/net/lib/wireguard/wg.c updated the peer endpoint from a message it could not authenticate. In handle_transport_data(), when the 32-bit receiver index of an incoming transport-data message matched no session, the code both scheduled a new handshake and copied the datagram's source address into peer->endpoint with memcpy(&peer->endpoint, peer_addr, sizeof(peer->endpoint)). Because the receiver index is unknown, there is no key with which such a message could be verified, so the address written into peer->endpoint is entirely attacker-supplied. Every other endpoint update in the implementation happens only after authentication — after the Noise handshake in handle_handshake_init(), or after AEAD decryption plus the anti-replay check in wg_process_data_message(). The WireGuard listener is registered with net_udp_register() using no remote address or port filter and defaults to UDP port 51820 (CONFIG_WIREGUARD_PORT), and wg_ctrl_recv() resolves the peer by interface rather than by any cryptographic identity. Any host able to send a UDP datagram to that port can therefore reach the defect off-path, with no need to observe legitimate traffic: a 16-byte datagram carrying the transport-data type, zeroed reserved bytes and an arbitrary receiver index is sufficient. The vulnerable branch runs whenever the peer has neither a valid handshake nor a current keypair — the state at boot and after a session expires. A single spoofed datagram redirects peer->endpoint to an address of the attacker's choosing, and all subsequent handshake initiations, keepalives and encrypted data packets are sent there. The legitimate peer never receives the initiations and so never re-authenticates, and nothing resets the endpoint afterwards, leaving the tunnel persistently unusable on devices whose peer does not initiate handshakes itself. The attacker can also relay the redirected initiations to the real peer to place itself in the path of the tunnel, observing ciphertext and traffic metadata and selectively dropping packets. WireGuard's end-to-end cryptography still prevents decryption or forgery of tunnel content, so the impact is loss of availability plus limited confidentiality, not key compromise. The fix removes the endpoint learning from this path entirely: the stale-session recovery is kept, but the handshake is sent only to an endpoint learnt from an authenticated message, falling back to the configured cfg_endpoint, and the message is dropped when neither is known. CONFIG_WIREGUARD is marked experimental and is not enabled by default.

The advisory is available at github.com. This vulnerability is traded as CVE-2026-79977 since 08/25/2026. The exploitability is told to be easy. It is possible to launch the attack remotely. The exploitation doesn't require any form of authentication. Successful exploitation requires user interaction by the victim. Technical details are known, but there is no available exploit. This vulnerability is assigned to T1204.001 by the MITRE ATT&CK project.

Applying the patch cbaaf3e9dbe08be21f01bd23142e1ffe91fd4db6 is able to eliminate this problem.

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Productinfo

Type

• Project Management Software

Vendor

• ZephyrProject

Name

• Zephyr

Version

• 4.4.0
• 4.4.1
• 4.4.2

CPE 2.3info

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CPE 2.2info

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