CyberRota Analysis
AI-GeneratedThe UpdateHub over-the-air update client is vulnerable due to a flaw in the socket management during connection failures, which leads to a permanent leak of CoAP/DTLS socket descriptors. This vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker to disrupt the DTLS handshake, causing a denial-of-service condition as the socket pool is exhausted, ultimately degrading network functionality until the device is rebooted. Organizations utilizing the UpdateHub client should prioritize addressing this issue, particularly those with frequent OTA updates or in environments where network reliability is critical.
Public Exploit Signal
A public exploit, PoC, GitHub repository or Metasploit reference was detected for this CVE.
Note: these links are listed for security research and verification purposes only.
Original NVD Description
The UpdateHub over-the-air update client's start_coap_client() in subsys/mgmt/updatehub/updatehub.c leaks the CoAP/DTLS socket descriptor on its connection-setup failure paths. The shared error: cleanup gated socket closing on a ret > 0 flag, but ret was set to -1 immediately after the socket was created, so when zsock_setsockopt() (DTLS) or zsock_connect() subsequently failed the gate was false and cleanup_connection() was never called. The open descriptor in the global ctx.sock was then overwritten by the next attempt, permanently leaking it from the socket / net_context pool until reboot. The failing setup path is reached every time the OTA client tries to contact the UpdateHub server and the connection cannot be established — driven automatically by the periodic autohandler() poll (and on demand via the updatehub_probe()/updatehub_update() API or the updatehub run shell command). The DTLS handshake/connect outcome is influenceable by a network or on-path attacker who drops, resets, or otherwise disrupts traffic to the server, and also fails naturally whenever the server is unreachable. Each failed attempt permanently leaks one descriptor; once the shared socket pool is exhausted, networking degrades device-wide until the device is rebooted, a denial-of-service condition. Severity is low because the leak rate is bounded by the configured OTA poll interval (default once per 24 hours), the effect is gradual and recovered by reboot, and only builds with the UpdateHub client enabled are affected. There is no memory-corruption, information-disclosure, or authentication impact.