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Advisory severityMedium5.5Red Hat Linux

Medium [CVE-2026-68330] Fix DMA direction for NPU mailbox buffer

This medium-severity Red Hat Linux advisory covers CVE-2026-68330.

Aggregated and source-linked by VulniPulse. Data sources, validation and limitations.

CVE-2026-68330 Source published Source updated

VulniPulse record published Record updated

Affected products & platforms
Red Hat LinuxUnclassified
Open source advisory

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Summary

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: net: airoha: Fix DMA direction for NPU mailbox buffer airoha_npu_send_msg() always maps the mailbox buffer with DMA_TO_DEVICE, but some callers expect the NPU to write response data back into the same buffer: - airoha_npu_wlan_msg_get() (NPU_OP_GET): NPU writes response into the buffer, then the caller reads it via memcpy() - airoha_npu_ppe_stats_setup() (NPU_OP_SET): NPU writes back npu_stats_addr field in the response On non-cache-coherent architectures like EN7581 (Cortex-A53 without hardware cache coherency for NPU DMA), DMA_TO_DEVICE unmap is a no-op — it does not invalidate the CPU cache.

If the NPU-written cache line is still present in the CPU cache when the caller reads the buffer, the CPU observes stale data instead of the NPU response.

This is a timing-sensitive bug: small mailbox buffers (~24 bytes) typically fit in a single cache line and may survive in the cache until the caller reads them, producing silent data corruption rather than a crash.

The bug is more likely to trigger when the caller reads the response immediately after dma_unmap_single() without intervening cache-evicting operations. Fix by using DMA_BIDIRECTIONAL for both map and unmap, which ensures dma_unmap_single() invalidates the CPU cache on non-coherent systems.

Affected versions

No affected-version range was extracted from the source record. The vendor advisory is authoritative — check it before change work.

Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 2 days ago·verify at source

Fixed versions

No fixed release is recorded yet. That does not prove no patch exists — confirm against the vendor advisory.

Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 2 days ago·verify at source

Mitigation checklist

Recommended fix / mitigation
  • To mitigate this issue, prevent the airoha_eth module from loading. See https://access.redhat.com/solutions/41278 for instructions.

Official advisory · high-confidence parse· fetched 2 days ago·verify at source

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