CVE-2026-15890

5.3 MEDIUMpublic exploit available

Published 2026-09-21 · Updated 2026-09-21

AI risk analysis

Summary: The flaw involves a race condition in the nonce generation for secure storage operations, leading to nonce reuse with the same key, which can result in plaintext leakage and authentication key exposure.
Exploitability: Exploitation requires concurrent access to the same secure storage UID, making it moderately difficult but feasible given proper conditions.
Blast radius: If exploited, this could lead to significant data breaches, including sensitive key exposure, affecting multiple stored secrets simultaneously.
Prioritized remediation: Implement thread-safe nonce generation and ensure serialization of write operations to prevent concurrent access.

nonce-reusedata-leakagecrypto-failure

Analysis generated locally by qwen2.5:7b-instruct (no data left the box). AI-assisted — verify against primary sources before acting.

NVD description

The default AEAD nonce provider for the PSA Internal Trusted Storage transform module, secure_storage_its_transform_aead_get_nonce() in subsys/secure_storage/src/its/transform/aead_get.c, stores its nonce counter in unsynchronized function-local static variables (s_nonce and s_nonce_initialized). Every ITS write obtains its AES-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305 nonce here via secure_storage_its_transform_to_store(). Because the function held no lock, two threads calling it concurrently race on the shared statics: the initialization path (psa_generate_random() followed by memcpy()) and the non-atomic increment-then-copy path can each hand the same nonce value to two distinct encryption operations, and can lose increments so the counter repeats values it was designed never to repeat. The ITS layer (secure_storage_its_set() in subsys/secure_storage/src/its/implementation.c) performs no serialization of its own, so concurrent same-UID writes reach the racy provider directly. Reusing a nonce with the same key under AES-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305 is a catastrophic AEAD failure: it leaks the XOR of the two plaintexts (ITS routinely stores secrets, including PSA persistent keys) and, for GCM, exposes the authentication key, enabling forgery of stored entries. Because the AEAD key is derived per entry UID, the security-relevant collision is two concurrent writes to the same UID both receiving the same nonce; an adversary able to read the raw backing storage can then exploit the reuse. Both ITS store back-ends shipped with Zephyr, zms.c and the settings/NVS back-end in settings.c, are log-structured flash stores with deferred garbage collection, so an entry superseded by a rewrite remains physically present in the partition until its sector is reclaimed. Two same-UID writes that race therefore leave both ciphertexts readable in the raw image at once, which is the condition the nonce reuse needs to be exploitable. The trigger remains narrow: both built-in key providers (DEVICE_ID_HASH and ENTRY_UID_HASH) salt the derived key with the entry UID, so reuse across different UIDs is harmless, and the exposure requires an application that writes the same UID concurrently from two threads. The fix serializes the provider with a K_MUTEX_DEFINE(s_nonce_mutex) held for the duration of nonce generation.

CVSS vector

CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:L/A:N

Weaknesses

CWE-323, CWE-362

Public exploit & PoC references

All references

Source data: NVD (nvd.nist.gov), public domain. Exploit-DB.ai adds local AI analysis for defensive use only.

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