Bug 2528685 (CVE-2026-80829)

Summary: CVE-2026-80829 kernel: ALSA: usb-audio: fix OOB write in snd_usbmidi_novation_output()
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedCC: akhatavk, aos-team-art-private, asdas, dpaolell, jdelft, jupierce, lgarciaa, mbiarnes, ppalepu, ppostler, prdhamdh, rhel-process-autobot, sghai, sidsharm, suppawar, vlaad, watson-tool-maintainers
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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Doc Text:
A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's ALSA USB audio driver. A local attacker with a specially crafted USB device could exploit this vulnerability. By providing a malformed `wMaxPacketSize` value, the device can trigger an out-of-bounds write in the kernel's memory. This memory corruption could lead to a system crash, resulting in a denial of service, or potentially allow for arbitrary code execution.
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-09-04 16:24:07 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

ALSA: usb-audio: fix OOB write in snd_usbmidi_novation_output()

snd_usbmidi_novation_output() lays out a two-byte header at
transfer_buffer[0..1] and passes &transfer_buffer[2] together with a
length of ep->max_transfer - 2 to snd_rawmidi_transmit():

	count = snd_rawmidi_transmit(ep->ports[0].substream,
				     &transfer_buffer[2],
				     ep->max_transfer - 2);

ep->max_transfer comes from the output endpoint's wMaxPacketSize via
usb_maxpacket(). A malformed or malicious device can advertise a bulk
OUT endpoint with a wMaxPacketSize of 1 - the USB core only clamps this
value downwards - so ep->max_transfer becomes 1 and the count argument
becomes -1.

snd_rawmidi_transmit() passes the negative count on to
__snd_rawmidi_transmit_peek(), where "if (count1 > count) count1 = count"
leaves count1 negative; get_aligned_size() keeps it negative for a
byte-stream substream, so the following memcpy(buffer, ..., count1) runs
with a (size_t)-1 length and writes far past the transfer buffer, which
was allocated with usb_alloc_coherent(ep->max_transfer).

This is the same class of bug that was fixed for snd_usbmidi_akai_output()
in commit 0970274613fb ("ALSA: usb-audio: fix OOB write in
snd_usbmidi_akai_output()"); the novation output routine was left
unguarded. Bail out when the endpoint cannot hold the two-byte header
plus at least one payload byte.