CVE-2025-38420: wifi: carl9170: do not ping device which has failed to load firmware

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 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: 2025-07-25 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-476

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: wifi: carl9170: do not ping device which has failed to load firmware Syzkaller reports [1, 2] crashes caused by an attempts to ping the device which has failed to load firmware. Since such a device doesn't pass 'ieee80211_register_hw()', an internal workqueue managed by 'ieee80211_queue_work()' is not yet created and an attempt to queue work on it causes null-ptr-deref. [1] https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?extid=9a4aec827829942045ff [2] https://syzkaller.appspot.com/bug?extid=0d8afba53e8fb2633217

Affected products

Debian Linux: 11.0
Linux kernel: from 2.6.38 before 5.4.295; from 5.5 before 5.10.239; from 5.11 before 5.15.186; from 5.16 before 6.1.142; from 6.2 before 6.6.95; from 6.7 before 6.12.35 — fixed in 5.10.239, 5.15.186, 5.4.295, 6.1.142, 6.12.35, 6.15.4

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 5.10.239, 5.15.186, 5.4.295, 6.1.142. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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