What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-97601: ieee802154: 6lowpan: fix NULL dereference in lowpan_newlink

• 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: 2026-09-25 · updated 2026-10-19

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: ieee802154: 6lowpan: fix NULL dereference in lowpan_newlink TUNSETLINK allows a TUN device to change its link-layer type to ARPHRD_IEEE802154 without initializing ieee802154_ptr. lowpan_newlink() checks only the device type before dereferencing the pointer, so an RTM_NEWLINK request can trigger a NULL pointer dereference. Reject devices without ieee802154_ptr along with devices of the wrong type.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: 4.3 — fixed in 7.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Linux kernel 7.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/16d8e0b560d50cd1a9e6d77a9a154a94c4d6021e
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/1c7710af7ad9532b534f1c134c11b04dbe4e0e0f
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/5063b9354e6e285dae61e530b30458498444a914
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/543994fa03c36a91d967a12c5c99cae74899504c
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/8528da2333ce05cf627f93425f9d05efb08b3146
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/98ce5a42cde780ee0e40378607d4428c8fc12ec1
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a1760f21c32adce41af5ed5687200865d8feaaeb
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/bf79662bc85e820ac3b846e2f347da29fbf6ac95

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