Severity by source
AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
Bluetooth Mesh adjacency (AV:A), provisioner credential required (PR:H), and purely availability impact via slot exhaustion reversible by reboot (A:L) justify this vector.
Primary rating from Vendor (zephyr).
CVSS VectorNVD
Lifecycle Timeline
4DescriptionNVD
Zephyr's Bluetooth Mesh subnet key management leaks one PSA Crypto key slot on every subnet-key teardown. In subsys/bluetooth/mesh/subnet.c, net_keys_create() imports the Private Beacon Key into a PSA key slot under CONFIG_BT_MESH_PRIV_BEACONS (enabled by default), but subnet_keys_destroy() guarded the matching psa_destroy_key() with CONFIG_BT_MESH_V1d1. That Kconfig symbol was removed when explicit Mesh 1.0.1 support was dropped, so the destroy branch became permanently dead code and the import is never balanced by a destroy.
The imbalanced teardown is reached every time subnet keys are destroyed: deleting a subnet (Config Server NetKey Delete), completing a Key Refresh Procedure (which retires the old key set), and resetting/re-provisioning the node. The over-the-air triggers are processed only under the node's device key, so they are exercisable by the provisioner or network administrator that owns the node, reachable over the Bluetooth Mesh network.
With the default CONFIG_MBEDTLS_PSA_KEY_SLOT_COUNT of 16, repeated add/delete or key-refresh cycles exhaust the shared PSA key-slot pool after roughly a dozen rounds. Once exhausted, bt_mesh_private_beacon_key() and thus subnet creation fail: the node can no longer add subnets or complete key refresh, and other PSA crypto consumers on the device may be starved, until the device is rebooted. The fix aligns the destroy guard with the import guard (CONFIG_BT_MESH_PRIV_BEACONS) so each slot is freed.
AnalysisAI
PSA Crypto key slot exhaustion in Zephyr's Bluetooth Mesh subnet.c permanently leaks one key slot on every subnet key teardown when CONFIG_BT_MESH_PRIV_BEACONS is enabled (the default). Devices running Zephyr 3.6.0 through 4.4.x are affected: a provisioner or network administrator with the node's device key can trigger the leak via Config Server NetKey Delete, Key Refresh Procedure, or reprovisioning over the Bluetooth Mesh network. With the default pool of 16 PSA key slots, roughly a dozen such operations exhaust the pool, preventing subnet creation and potentially starving other on-device PSA consumers until a reboot. No public exploit or CISA KEV listing exists; real-world impact is constrained by the high-privilege and proximity requirements.
Technical ContextAI
Zephyr RTOS (cpe:2.3:a:zephyrproject:zephyr:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*) implements Bluetooth Mesh in subsys/bluetooth/mesh/subnet.c. The PSA Crypto API allocates opaque key slots from a shared pool sized by CONFIG_MBEDTLS_PSA_KEY_SLOT_COUNT (default 16). net_keys_create() calls bt_mesh_private_beacon_key() - which imports the Private Beacon Key via psa_import_key() - whenever CONFIG_BT_MESH_PRIV_BEACONS is defined (enabled by default). The balancing psa_destroy_key() in subnet_keys_destroy() was historically gated on CONFIG_BT_MESH_V1d1, a Kconfig symbol that was removed when explicit Mesh 1.0.1 support was dropped. The destroy branch therefore became unreachable dead code, producing a classic CWE-401 (Missing Release of Memory after Effective Lifetime) resource leak at the PSA key-slot layer. The commit diff confirms the one-line fix: changing the preprocessor guard from CONFIG_BT_MESH_V1d1 to CONFIG_BT_MESH_PRIV_BEACONS so allocation and deallocation are symmetrically conditioned.
RemediationAI
Upgrade to Zephyr 4.5.0 or any later release containing commit f573da9f53630082ae95fcfd39fb021fe15f7abd, which changes the preprocessor guard in subnet_keys_destroy() from CONFIG_BT_MESH_V1d1 to CONFIG_BT_MESH_PRIV_BEACONS, symmetrically conditioning the psa_destroy_key() call to match the psa_import_key() call in net_keys_create(). The patch is documented at https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/commit/f573da9f53630082ae95fcfd39fb021fe15f7abd. For deployments that cannot upgrade immediately, two compensating controls exist with trade-offs: (1) Disable CONFIG_BT_MESH_PRIV_BEACONS in the build configuration - this eliminates the leak entirely but removes Private Beacon functionality, which is required for enhanced privacy in Mesh 1.1 networks; (2) Increase CONFIG_MBEDTLS_PSA_KEY_SLOT_COUNT beyond the default of 16 to slow exhaustion rate - this delays but does not eliminate the leak, and consumes additional RAM proportional to slot count. Restrict Config Server NetKey Delete and Key Refresh Procedure messages to trusted provisioners as an operational control.
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Same weakness CWE-401 – Memory Leak
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External POC / Exploit Code
Leaving vuln.today
EUVD-2026-52002