What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-97518: wifi: cfg80211: reject duplicate wiphy cipher suite entries

• 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: 2026-09-24 · updated 2026-10-30

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: wifi: cfg80211: reject duplicate wiphy cipher suite entries Duplicate entries in wiphy->cipher_suites do not describe any additional capability, but cfg80211 currently accepts them and leaves individual consumers to deal with them. One such consumer is the WEXT compatibility code, which appends a WEP key length for each WEP cipher entry it sees. Repeated WEP entries can therefore overflow the fixed iw_range::encoding_size array returned by SIOCGIWRANGE. Reject duplicate cipher suite entries in wiphy_register() instead. This keeps the cipher suite invariant in one place and makes malformed wiphy descriptions fail early with -EINVAL, rather than relying on a single cfg80211 user to handle duplicates correctly.

Affected products

• Linux: 2.6.32 — fixed in 7.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux 7.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/1305f8b925fe92edf5fec183588dfc7db719180b
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/4cbb2360f4d8c29e67bc7a8bf6ba0ae096583923
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/539d7f795bf0c41fb533c99e6010cdfaf5a1b6a6
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/7187d145d9042b037e4f10538f70cf95e380219f
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/d12e92e72db914e1ea777c6f246f6be75985438e

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