Divide-by-zero in DesignWare SPI driver reachable from spi_transceive syscall (local DoS)

CVE-2026-10679

What is CVE-2026-10679?

The DesignWare SPI driver (drivers/spi/spi_dw.c) computed the SPI BAUDR clock divider as info->clock_frequency / config->frequency without validating config->frequency.

spi_transceive is a Zephyr __syscall and its verify handler (drivers/spi/spi_handlers.c) copies the caller-supplied spi_config from userspace without checking the frequency field, so a userspace thread that has been granted access to a DesignWare SPI device kernel object can pass frequency = 0 and trigger an unsigned integer divide-by-zero in spi_dw_configure().

On Cortex-M Mainline (SCB->CCR.DIV_0_TRP is set in z_arm_fault_init()) and on ARC (a dedicated __ev_div_zero vector) this raises a CPU exception, resulting in a kernel fault and local denial of service.

The fix rejects zero frequency and frequencies above clock_frequency / 2 (the DesignWare SSI databook minimum SCKDIV of 2) with -EINVAL. The defect affects all Zephyr releases up to and including v4.4.0; exploitation requires CONFIG_USERSPACE=y and an unprivileged thread already granted SPI driver permission. There is no memory-corruption or information-disclosure impact.

References