CVE-2026-37540
Published: 01 May 2026
Summary
CVE-2026-37540 is a high-severity Integer Overflow or Wraparound (CWE-190) vulnerability. Its CVSS base score is 8.4 (High).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Exploitation for Privilege Escalation (T1068); ranked at the 3.5th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
The strongest mitigations our analysis identified are NIST 800-53 SI-10 (Information Input Validation) and SI-2 (Flaw Remediation).
Threat & Defense at a Glance
Threat & Defense Details
Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5)AI
Directly remediates the integer overflow in elf_loader.c by identifying, patching, and deploying fixes to OpenAMP v2025.10.0.
Requires validation of attacker-controlled 16-bit ELF header values prior to multiplication to detect and reject values that would cause integer overflow on 32-bit systems.
Verifies firmware image integrity cryptographically before loading, blocking malicious ELF images crafted to trigger the parsing overflow.
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI
Why these techniques?
Local unprivileged attacker supplies malicious ELF to trigger integer overflow in parser, enabling memory corruption or code execution for privilege escalation on the system.
NVD Description
OpenAMP v2025.10.0 ELF loader contains an integer overflow vulnerability in firmware image parsing. In elf_loader.c, it performs multiplication of two attacker-controlled 16-bit values from the ELF header without overflow checking. On 32-bit embedded systems (STM32MP1, Zynq, i.MX), large values can…
more
cause the product to wrap around to a small value.
Deeper analysisAI
CVE-2026-37540 is an integer overflow vulnerability (CWE-190) in the ELF loader of OpenAMP version 2025.10.0. The issue resides in elf_loader.c, where the code multiplies two attacker-controlled 16-bit values from the ELF header without overflow checking. On 32-bit embedded systems such as STM32MP1, Zynq, and i.MX, large input values cause the product to wrap around to a small value, published on 2026-05-01 with a CVSS v3.1 score of 8.4 (AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H).
A local attacker with no privileges can exploit this vulnerability with low attack complexity and no user interaction. By providing a malicious ELF firmware image, the attacker triggers the overflow during parsing, potentially leading to high impacts on confidentiality, integrity, and availability.
Mitigation details are available in related advisories and source code references, including the primary disclosure at https://gist.github.com/sgInnora/f4ac66faeefe07a653ceeb3f58cdc381, the OpenAMP repository at https://github.com/OpenAMP/open-amp, and the affected elf_loader.c file at https://github.com/OpenAMP/open-amp/blob/main/lib/remoteproc/elf_loader.c.
Details
- CWE(s)