What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-21979: wifi: cfg80211: cancel wiphy_work before freeing wiphy

• 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: 2025-04-01 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-416

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: wifi: cfg80211: cancel wiphy_work before freeing wiphy A wiphy_work can be queued from the moment the wiphy is allocated and initialized (i.e. wiphy_new_nm). When a wiphy_work is queued, the rdev::wiphy_work is getting queued. If wiphy_free is called before the rdev::wiphy_work had a chance to run, the wiphy memory will be freed, and then when it eventally gets to run it'll use invalid memory. Fix this by canceling the work before freeing the wiphy.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: from 6.1.57 before 6.1.132; from 6.5 before 6.6.84; from 6.7 before 6.12.20; from 6.13 before 6.13.8; 6.14-rc1, 6.14-rc2, 6.14-rc3, 6.14-rc4, 6.14-rc5, 6.14-rc6 — fixed in 6.1.132, 6.12.20, 6.13.8, 6.6.84

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 6.1.132, 6.12.20, 6.13.8, 6.6.84. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/0272d4af7f92997541d8bbf4c51918b93ded6ee2
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/72d520476a2fab6f3489e8388ab524985d6c4b90
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/75d262ad3c36d52852d764588fcd887f0fcd9138
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8930a3e1568cf534f86c8ed2def817c6d0528fc1
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a5158d67bff06cb6fea31be39aeb319fd908ed8e
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/dea22de162058216a90f2706f0d0b36f0ff309fd
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2025/05/msg00045.html

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