What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-98197: hwmon: (w83791d) remove fan/pwm 4-5 sysfs group on remove

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.0 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-10-06 · updated 2026-10-19

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: hwmon: (w83791d) remove fan/pwm 4-5 sysfs group on remove When the fan/pwm 4-5 pins are not used as GPIO, w83791d_probe() creates the w83791d_group_fanpwm45 sysfs group on the I2C client device. The probe error path removes this group when a later initialization step fails, but the normal remove path only removes w83791d_group. As a result, the optional fan/pwm 4-5 sysfs files can remain after the driver is unbound. The callbacks associated with these files access the driver data, which is devm allocated and released after driver unbind. Leaving the sysfs files behind can therefore result in accesses to stale driver data. Remove w83791d_group_fanpwm45 during normal teardown as well. This issue was found by manual code inspection.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: 2.6.28 — 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/081e3a78453635fb370b1712809d2af29e60b4c5
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/0ff9c7775e51ac6d47b1bb5c46f06b1434fe58a8
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/2c381e6e0f033f2df13bd64905e7232c42f49009
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/2ccf6c512290a288a2d4d7f076430dfb0c6ee476
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/2dd37d00f1f1af8e02ffa70ee573c10fd1a76864
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/583e04e88e75b8d57304015d83c38e82a9531600
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/b1d419eb3bc41245c3d3d99dfe1a7b6c45989586
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f6e2ab72f32d16d71a2549c7ea062dd209f71670

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