What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-53602: wifi: ath11k: fix memory leak in WMI firmware stats

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2025-10-04 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-401

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: wifi: ath11k: fix memory leak in WMI firmware stats Memory allocated for firmware pdev, vdev and beacon statistics are not released during rmmod. Fix it by calling ath11k_fw_stats_free() function before hardware unregister. While at it, avoid calling ath11k_fw_stats_free() while processing the firmware stats received in the WMI event because the local list is getting spliced and reinitialised and hence there are no elements in the list after splicing. Tested-on: QCN9074 hw1.0 PCI WLAN.HK.2.7.0.1-01744-QCAHKSWPL_SILICONZ-1

Affected products

• Linux kernel: from 5.6 before 6.1.42; from 6.2 before 6.4.7 — fixed in 6.1.42, 6.4.7

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 6.1.42, 6.4.7. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/55248d36beb79d3a61c9fb3122dc377fff523c89
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/6aafa1c2d3e3fea2ebe84c018003f2a91722e607
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/86f9330a49d1464849482298dd34d361859183eb

Get alerted when CVE-2023-53602 or the next vulnerability affects your stack