Researcher Develops Kernel Exploit for TP-Link EAP770 to Disable Faulty Qualcomm SFE Offload
A user who purchased the TP-Link EAP770 v1 Wi-Fi 7 access point in 2023 discovered persistent data corruption during large file transfers over Wi-Fi. The root cause was a DMA cache coherency bug in the Qualcomm qca-nss-dp driver combined with SFE/PPE hardware offload that recalculated TCP checksums on corrupted packets. TP-Link ended support for the v1 model before release and provided no firmware updates, while the device's restricted shell prevented the required sysfs writes. The researcher chained CVE-2022-0185 with pipe buffer manipulation to achieve root access, disable the offload features, and stop the corruption without bricking the device. The exploit was developed and tested first in QEMU using the closest available GPL kernel sources from the EAP783 model before being adapted to the live hardware. A separate unrelated bug was also found in the client Wi-Fi card firmware causing connection drops.
HabrOct 25, 2026Translated from Russian