In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
net: airoha: Fix DMA direction for NPU mailbox buffer
airoha_npu_send_msg() always maps the mailbox buffer with DMA_TO_DEVICE, but some callers expect the NPU to write response data back into the same buffer:
- airoha_npu_wlan_msg_get() (NPU_OP_GET): NPU writes response into
- airoha_npu_ppe_stats_setup() (NPU_OP_SET): NPU writes back
On non-cache-coherent architectures like EN7581 (Cortex-A53 without hardware cache coherency for NPU DMA), DMA_TO_DEVICE unmap is a no-op — it does not invalidate the CPU cache. If the NPU-written cache line is still present in the CPU cache when the caller reads the buffer, the CPU observes stale data instead of the NPU response.
This is a timing-sensitive bug: small mailbox buffers (~24 bytes) typically fit in a single cache line and may survive in the cache until the caller reads them, producing silent data corruption rather than a crash. The bug is more likely to trigger when the caller reads the response immediately after dma_unmap_single() without intervening cache-evicting operations.
Fix by using DMA_BIDIRECTIONAL for both map and unmap, which ensures dma_unmap_single() invalidates the CPU cache on non-coherent systems. The mailbox buffers are small so there is no performance concern.