What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-98423: wifi: mac80211_hwsim: don't hand frames to mac80211 while stopping

• 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: 2026-10-14 · updated 2026-10-19

Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: wifi: mac80211_hwsim: don't hand frames to mac80211 while stopping The code checks ->started for frames coming from wmediumd, but the radio can be stopped after the check and before frame delivery, causing mac80211 to hit the WARN_ON(!local->started). Expand the mutex for this case and synchronise against it when the radio is stopped to avoid being able to hit the warning with hwsim. Drop the error print that would've complicated the error path, it only triggers for allocation failures (already noisy) and malformed frames anyway.

Affected products

• Linux kernel: 3.1 — 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/2f59be7585dc81baa6f36b0035dd6848ea43d318
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/5c79ef616aa16af582fb2cb93b0f750975a0004f
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/5ce9b2bc9e73213e316a8c72400256a76bf41814
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/87840d4a3a21b1c19b867a80e16ba69dff284de2
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/c4e4fe330294e3936e0f4e15d6996468f8a45fb2
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/d7fa45d8123a7f794b93fc22dbcf19f38dc4d8cb

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