SOC status:Duty analyst on shift

UK Cyber Defence
VulnerabilityModified

CVE-2020-12883

Buffer over-reads were discovered in the CoAP library in Arm Mbed OS 5.15.3.

CRITICAL 9.1EPSS 1.78%

Does this matter?

High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (1.78%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit.

Description

Buffer over-reads were discovered in the CoAP library in Arm Mbed OS 5.15.3. The CoAP parser is responsible for parsing received CoAP packets. The function sn_coap_parser_options_parse() parses CoAP input linearly using a while loop. Once an option is parsed in a loop, the current point (*packet_data_pptr) is increased correspondingly. The pointer is restricted by the size of the received buffer, as well as by the option delta and option length bytes. The actual input packet length is not verified against the number of bytes read when processing the option extended delta and the option extended length. Moreover, the calculation of the message_left variable, in the case of non-extended option deltas, is incorrect and indicates more data left for processing than provided in the function input. All of these lead to heap-based or stack-based memory location read access that is outside of the intended boundary of the buffer. Depending on the platform-specific memory management mechanisms, it can lead to processing of unintended inputs or system memory access violation errors.

CVSS 3.1
9.1 CRITICALCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:H
EPSS
1.78% probability · 78th percentile
Public exploits
None in Exploit-DB
CISA KEV
Not listed
Weakness
CWE-125
Affected
arm/mbed os
Source
cve@mitre.org
EPSS trend
0%3%5%26 October 2026: 1.78%26 October 202626 October 2026

EPSS 1.8% since 26 October 2026; no change recorded yet. Points are recorded when the score first appears and whenever it moves by a percentage point or more.

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA, exploits from Exploit-DB. Refreshed daily. Download this record as JSON.