CVE-2023-52531: wifi: iwlwifi: mvm: Fix a memory corruption issue

Severity: high (CVSS 7.8 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2024-03-02 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-787

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: wifi: iwlwifi: mvm: Fix a memory corruption issue A few lines above, space is kzalloc()'ed for: sizeof(struct iwl_nvm_data) + sizeof(struct ieee80211_channel) + sizeof(struct ieee80211_rate) 'mvm->nvm_data' is a 'struct iwl_nvm_data', so it is fine. At the end of this structure, there is the 'channels' flex array. Each element is of type 'struct ieee80211_channel'. So only 1 element is allocated in this array. When doing: mvm->nvm_data->bands[0].channels = mvm->nvm_data->channels; We point at the first element of the 'channels' flex array. So this is fine. However, when doing: mvm->nvm_data->bands[0].bitrates = (void *)((u8 *)mvm->nvm_data->channels + 1); because of the "(u8 *)" cast, we add only 1 to the address of the beginning of the flex array. It is likely that we want point at the 'struct ieee80211_rate' allocated just after. Remove the spurious casting so that the pointer arithmetic works as expected.

Affected products

Linux kernel: from 3.9 before 5.15.135; from 5.16 before 6.1.57; from 6.2 before 6.5.7; 6.6-rc1, 6.6-rc2, 6.6-rc3, 6.6-rc4 — fixed in 5.15.135, 6.1.57, 6.5.7

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 5.15.135, 6.1.57, 6.5.7. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

Get alerted when CVE-2023-52531 or the next vulnerability affects your stack