CVE-2026-90591: NXP ENET-QOS Ethernet driver re-arms RX descriptors with a clobbered DMA buffer address on packet drop

The NXP ENET-QOS Ethernet driver's receive work handler eth_nxp_enet_qos_rx() in drivers/ethernet/eth_nxp_enet_qos hands each processed descriptor back to the DMA by writing desc->read.control = rx_desc_refresh_flags, which sets OWN_FLAG and BUF1_ADDR_VALID_FLAG. RDES0 of a receive descriptor is the DMA buffer address in read format, but the hardware write-back aliases that word with the VLAN tag fields (or, for a context descriptor, the timestamp low word), so it is destroyed on every completion. The success path rewrites desc->read.buf1_addr before re-arming; the four drop paths — errored or non-first descriptor, net_pkt_rx_alloc() failure, invalid descriptor length, and net_pkt_get_frag() failure — did not, re-arming the ring slot with the write-back residue as its DMA target address. The drop paths are driven entirely by received traffic and need no privilege or special configuration. With the defaults for this driver (CONFIG_NET_BUF_DATA_SIZE of 128 and 16 receive descriptors) a single full-size frame consumes twelve ring slots and twelve K_NO_WAIT fragment allocations, so a short burst of frames sent to the device exhausts the receive pools and reaches the allocation-failure paths; a frame with a receive error, or any frame whose first descriptor was already dropped, reaches the non-first-descriptor path. Once a slot has been poisoned, the DMA writes the next frame received in that slot to an address derived from the frame's VLAN tag fields rather than to a receive buffer. On the supported MCX SoCs that address falls in flash or reserved space, so the transfer raises a fatal bus error that the driver only logs — there is no reset or recovery path — and reception stops permanently until the device is rebooted; where the write is silently discarded instead, the untouched buffer is later handed to the network stack with a length, delivering stale buffer contents as if they were a received frame. A single triggering event is enough to make the condition persistent, so an attacker able to send traffic to the device can permanently disable its network interface.

• Pre-auth
• Memory safety
• Denial of service

Published

Nov 9, 2026

Updated

Nov 9, 2026

EPSS

0.2% · 20th percentile

CWE

CWE-787