Live › vulnerability › CVE-2026-98703
Go to dashboardWriting an arbitrary value to the mac80211 minstrel_ht fixed_rate_idx debugfs file indexes arrays out of bounds, corrupting adjacent kernel memory. The file is only reachable through a root-only debugfs mount, so the impact is limited to a local user with root.
Summary written from the sources below. Check the originals before acting.
First seen by InfraStack 2026-10-23 21:57 UTC. All times on this page are UTC.
Only systems with a mac80211 wifi driver loaded and debugfs mounted, where the fixed_rate_idx file is writable by root. The sources say it is not a privilege boundary, so exposure matters mainly on shared or multi-user machines. Systems without wifi hardware or without mac80211 can skip it.
No product ranges from the sources yet.
uname -r and compare against the fixed kernel version in the sources (unknown)lsmod | grep mac80211mount | grep debugfsEach row is the first time that source carried this signal. The analyst’s rows are its own findings.
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
wifi: mac80211: minstrel_ht: validate fixed rate index
The fixed_rate_idx debugfs file is a plain u32 attribute, so any value can be written to it. minstrel_ht_update_stats() then copies the value into mi->max_tp_rate[] and mi->max_prob_rate, and minstrel_ht_set_rate() uses MI_RATE_GROUP()/MI_RATE_IDX() to index minstrel_mcs_groups[] (42 entries) and mi->groups[].rates[] (10 entries) with it.
Writing e.g. 65535 selects group 4095 and rate index 15, far outside both arrays. The out-of-bounds entries are dereferenced and updated as struct minstrel_rate_stats (retry counts, etc.), so the invalid index corrupts adjacent kernel memory. With CONFIG_UBSAN_BOUNDS the access is reported as an array-index-out-of-bounds in minstrel_ht_set_rate().
Only a valid group/rate pair, or U32_MAX to disable fixed rate processing, can be used safely, so reject any other value when the debugfs file is written.
The file is only reachable through a root-only debugfs mount, so this is not a privilege boundary. The out-of-bounds access is still a bug that must not be reachable through a writable debugfs attribute.
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