What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-53715: wifi: brcmfmac: cfg80211: Pass the PMK in binary instead of hex

• Severity: unknown
• 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: 2025-10-22 · updated 2026-10-28

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: wifi: brcmfmac: cfg80211: Pass the PMK in binary instead of hex Apparently the hex passphrase mechanism does not work on newer chips/firmware (e.g. BCM4387). It seems there was a simple way of passing it in binary all along, so use that and avoid the hexification. OpenBSD has been doing it like this from the beginning, so this should work on all chips. Also clear the structure before setting the PMK. This was leaking uninitialized stack contents to the device.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: 4.13 — fixed in 6.4

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 6.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/1687845eb8f37360a9ee849a3587ab659b090773
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/2bc34facb90ceeff6f8c17d2006575a6d07c3825
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/2fa3a5226b05e0a797c68b9609dcebe0cd236b27
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/4e8dc0e5c7636efaadbd7e488acd34b4291c0431
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/56c7e9c39bd54fd753c0c4b1ed10278cbd3a5f02
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/89b89e52153fda2733562776c7c9d9d3ebf8dd6d
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/e242c66f7ecfe8f5b6eb308f4ea464fd8589c866
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f8a6c53ff1d91acd5a20eb627edbffd816eb9a4e

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