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Contiki-NG MQTT Client parse_publish_vhdr Persists a Flag Past an Over-Length Topic, Skipping the Length Guard on the Next Segment and Overflowing the Topic Buffer

Last refreshed2026-09-30

Status: NEW  |  Advisory ID: CVE-2026-5857

Key Details

CVECVE-2026-5857
CVSS Score / Version8.1 (High) / CVSS v3.1
Updated2026-09-24
CVSS VectorCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CVSS Proseattack vector is network; attack complexity is high; privileges required is none; user interaction is none; scope is unchanged; confidentiality impact is high; integrity impact is high; availability impact is high.
Classified asCWE-787 (Out-of-bounds Write)

What to Know

Contiki-NG's MQTT client parse_publish_vhdr() in os/net/app-layer/mqtt/mqtt.c sets topic_len_received=1 before checking topic_len against the 64-byte limit, so an over-length topic returns early but leaves the flag set. On the next TCP segment, tcp_input() re-invokes the parser with topic_received==0, and the persisted topic_len_received==1 skips the length-reading block containing the guard, falling through directly to a memcpy() that uses the unvalidated 16-bit topic_len as the copy length. The 65-byte topic[] destination overruns into adjacent struct fields including the payload_chunk pointer, which subsequent MQTT code dereferences, giving a compromised or attacker-controlled broker an arbitrary-pointer-write primitive. Contiki-NG's MQTT implementation has no TLS support so the connection is plaintext. Impact ranges from information disclosure and denial of service to remote code execution on embedded targets without memory protection. (NVD)

References

SourceReference
NVDhttps://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-5857
CVEhttps://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2026-5857