CVE-2026-25259: Out-of-bounds Write in DSP Service

Synopsis

An out-of-bounds write vulnerability affects the DSP service in several Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets, including Cologne, FastConnect 6900, FastConnect 7800, and QCA0000. An attacker with a low-privilege local account can trigger memory corruption by issuing multiple IOCTL commands for escape operations, requiring no network access or victim interaction. Successful exploitation gives the attacker full read, write, and crash capability over the affected process, enabling data theft, persistent modification of memory, or denial of service. HarborGuard tracks this advisory and will make a patched-image rebuild available the moment Qualcomm publishes a fix.

HarborGuard Coverage

Exploit Conditions

• Network reachabilityNot required

  The attacker needs an existing shell or process on the host; no network exposure is required to reach the vulnerable IOCTL interface.

• AuthenticationRequired

  Any low-privilege local account is sufficient; the attacker does not need administrator or root credentials to issue the malicious IOCTL commands.

• Victim interactionNot required

  No user interaction is needed; the attacker triggers the vulnerability entirely through their own process without involving another user.

• Attack complexityDetail

  Exploit complexity is low, meaning the attack is reliable and requires no special environmental conditions, race timing, or memory layout prerequisites.

Blast Radius

• Reads arbitrary memory regions accessible to the DSP service process, exposing sensitive data such as cryptographic material or session state stored in process memory.
• Writes to out-of-bounds memory locations, allowing the attacker to overwrite control structures or persistent data within the affected process.
• Crashes the DSP service process, disrupting any functionality that depends on digital signal processing or hardware-accelerated operations on the affected chipset.
• Chains the memory corruption primitive with additional local techniques to escalate privileges beyond the initial low-privilege foothold.