CVE-2026-98704 PUBLISHED

wifi: mac80211: keep fallback association elements alive

Assigner: Linux
Reserved: 25.09.2026 Published: 18.10.2026 Updated: 18.10.2026

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

wifi: mac80211: keep fallback association elements alive

Associating to a non-transmitted MBSSID profile reads freed memory while determining the operating channel and applying HT capabilities.

When an association response omits WMM, HT, or VHT information, ieee80211_assoc_config_link() parses the cached BSS IEs and copies the missing element pointers out of that fallback parse. For a non-transmitted MBSSID profile those pointers refer to merged-profile storage owned by the parse object, and the fallback block frees that object at its end. The copied pointers are used afterwards to determine the operating channel, configure bandwidth, and apply HT capabilities.

Keep the fallback parse result alive until association setup finishes.

[reorder variable declaration]

Product Status

Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: unaffected
  • affected from 5023b14cf4df4d22e1a80738167f3438c9e62e5f to 1d9644753d46c86b4e5c05bd6d9d35339ea27331 (excl.)
  • affected from 5023b14cf4df4d22e1a80738167f3438c9e62e5f to d0183cd1f6a2dba9e63be20af2f65093c9c8d121 (excl.)
  • affected from 5023b14cf4df4d22e1a80738167f3438c9e62e5f to 0878594c5806dd29fa5e16cc026ce19158afdad2 (excl.)
  • affected from 5023b14cf4df4d22e1a80738167f3438c9e62e5f to a10a2f80476d166fd81c361ec0319493671b694e (excl.)
Vendor Linux
Product Linux
Versions Default: affected
  • Version 5.2 is affected
  • unaffected from 0 to 5.2 (excl.)
  • unaffected from 6.12.113 to 6.12.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 6.18.56 to 6.18.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.2.10 to 7.2.* (incl.)
  • unaffected from 7.3-rc6 to * (incl.)

References