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UK Cyber Defence
VulnerabilityAwaiting Analysis

CVE-2026-13734

An attacker who captures one valid ciphertext off the wire (an on-path or shared-medium observer) can re-inject it from an arbitrary spoofed source address.

MEDIUM 6.5EPSS 0.25%

Does this matter?

Lower severity and a low EPSS score (0.25%). Track it; it rarely justifies an emergency change on its own.

Description

Zephyr's WireGuard VPN data-plane receive handler wg_process_data_message() in subsys/net/lib/wireguard/wg_crypto.c validated the anti-replay counter too late. After AEAD decryption of a MESSAGE_TRANSPORT_DATA packet succeeded, the code committed several peer-state changes — update_peer_addr() (endpoint roaming update), the keypair->last_rx/peer->last_rx liveness timers, and keypair_update() (promote next→current and destroy the previous keypair) — and only afterward called wg_check_replay(). On a replayed packet the replay check returned -EINVAL, but none of the preceding mutations were rolled back. The AEAD tag authenticates content but not freshness, so a replayed-but-authentic transport packet decrypts correctly. An attacker who captures one valid ciphertext off the wire (an on-path or shared-medium observer) can re-inject it from an arbitrary spoofed source address. Reaching the handler requires no credentials: it is driven directly from inbound UDP datagrams via the dispatch in subsys/net/lib/wireguard/wg.c. Because the state mutations committed before the replay check, the replay repoints the peer endpoint to the attacker-chosen source address (roaming hijack), redirecting the victim's subsequent outbound tunnel traffic until the legitimate peer's next packet re-corrects it; it also prematurely destroys the previous keypair and refreshes the RX liveness timer. The tunnel payload stays encrypted under the session keypair, so this is an integrity/availability impact (traffic redirection and session disruption), not payload disclosure. The fix moves wg_check_replay() to immediately after a successful decrypt, before any peer-state mutation, matching the WireGuard specification and the Linux reference implementation.

CVSS 3.1
6.5 MEDIUMCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:H
EPSS
0.25% probability · 16th percentile
CISA KEV
Not listed
Weakness
CWE-294
Source
vulnerabilities@zephyrproject.org

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA. Refreshed daily.