What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-38644: wifi: mac80211: reject TDLS operations when station is not associated

• 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: 2025-08-22 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-908

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: wifi: mac80211: reject TDLS operations when station is not associated syzbot triggered a WARN in ieee80211_tdls_oper() by sending NL80211_TDLS_ENABLE_LINK immediately after NL80211_CMD_CONNECT, before association completed and without prior TDLS setup. This left internal state like sdata->u.mgd.tdls_peer uninitialized, leading to a WARN_ON() in code paths that assumed it was valid. Reject the operation early if not in station mode or not associated.

Affected products

• Debian Linux: 11.0
• Linux kernel: from 3.17 before 6.1.148; from 6.2 before 6.6.102; from 6.7 before 6.12.42; from 6.13 before 6.15.10; from 6.16 before 6.16.1 — fixed in 6.1.148, 6.12.42, 6.15.10, 6.16.1, 6.6.102

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 6.1.148, 6.12.42, 6.15.10, 6.16.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/0c84204cf0bbe89e454a5caccc6a908bc7db1542
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/16ecdab5446f15a61ec88eb0d23d25d009821db0
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/31af06b574394530f68a4310c45ecbe2f68853c4
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/378ae9ccaea3f445838a087962a067b5cb2e8577
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/4df663d4c1ca386dcab2f743dfc9f0cc07aef73c
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/af72badd5ee423eb16f6ad7fe0a62f1b4252d848
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2025/10/msg00008.html

Get alerted when CVE-2025-38644 or the next vulnerability affects your stack