Type confusion in Zephyr HL78xx GNSS NMEA driver causes wild-pointer write from GNSS input

Overview

The Sierra Wireless HL78xx modem GNSS driver (drivers/modem/hl78xx/, later drivers/modem/vendor_standalone/hl78xx/) embeds a generic struct gnss_nmea0183_match_data match_data inside struct hl78xx_gnss_data. The generic NMEA0183 match helper (drivers/gnss/gnss_nmea0183_match.c) requires that context to be the first member because its callbacks cast user_data directly to struct gnss_nmea0183_match_data . In the affected releases match_data was the second member (after const struct device dev), so it sat at a non-zero offset while gnss_nmea0183_match_init() initialized it at the correct address. The registered NMEA handlers instead pass the whole device data object (data->devices.gnss->data, offset 0), producing an offset-shifted type confusion between where state is initialized and where the parse callbacks read and write it.

When NMEA sentences from the GNSS receiver are parsed, the GGA/RMC callbacks write parsed fix data into the wrong location within the struct, and the GSV callback (gnss_nmea0183_match_gsv_callback, active under CONFIG_GNSS_SATELLITES) reads its satellites pointer and bound from the wrong offsets — non-pointer bytes of struct hl78xx_gnss_data — and then writes parsed struct gnss_satellite entries through that bogus pointer. This is a write through an uninitialized/wild pointer with a garbage bound.

The NMEA handlers are registered by default (CONFIG_HL78XX_GNSS_SOURCE_NMEA is the default GNSS source) on devices using the HL78xx GNSS. The driver runs in kernel context and the NMEA data originates from the GNSS radio front-end, so a party able to influence the GNSS signal (for example GNSS/GPS spoofing at radio proximity) can drive the kernel-side parser into the faulty write. The most likely impact is a crash (denial of service) because the bogus pointer resolves to a fixed near-NULL value, with adjacent-memory corruption possible on MMU-less targets. Confidentiality is not affected. Exploitation requires the satellites feature to be enabled and active, so attack complexity is high.

Affected

• zephyr >= 4.4.0 < 4.4.2

Remediation

Refer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.