Medium · published October 14, 2026
The CC1200 sub-GHz IEEE 802.15.4 driver takes the PHY packet length from the first byte of the radio's RX FIFO in get_packet_length() and validates it in verify_rxfifo_validity() (drivers/ieee802154/ieee802154_cc1200.c). That validation only enforced a lower bound (pkt_len < 3); its second clause rejects a FIFO that holds more bytes than declared and therefore never bounds large values. Because the driver configures the radio for variable packet length with PKT_LEN = 0xFF, the length byte is an over-the-air value of 0-255 that reached net_pkt_rx_alloc_with_buffer() and the subsequent SPI burst read unclamped.
An unauthenticated attacker within radio range can transmit a frame that presents a length byte above the IEEE 802.15.4 maximum of 127 while the chip's 128-byte RX FIFO has not overflowed, so the driver's RX_FIFO_ERROR pre-check does not fire. Reaching this state depends on RF framing and timing, since the RX thread is driven off the PKT_SYNC_RXTX signal and may sample the FIFO before a packet is complete; no pairing, authentication, or user interaction is required.
With the default CONFIG_NET_BUF_FIXED_DATA_SIZE and CONFIG_NET_BUF_DATA_SIZE=128, an allocation larger than one fragment is satisfied by a chain of fragments, but read_rxfifo_content() performs a single SPI burst of pkt_len bytes into the first fragment's buf->data and then calls net_buf_add() with the same length. A length above 128 therefore writes up to 127 bytes past the end of a fragment in the contiguous rx_bufs pool and leaves a net_buf whose len exceeds its capacity. The overflowing bytes are FIFO-underflow output rather than attacker-chosen data, so the practical impact is network-buffer-pool corruption and crashes rather than a controlled write. Only builds that enable CONFIG_IEEE802154_CC1200 with an attached CC1200 radio are affected.