Live › vulnerability › CVE-2026-98704
Go to dashboardWhen a Linux machine associates with a non-transmitted MBSSID Wi-Fi profile, the mac80211 code reads memory it has already freed while picking the channel and applying HT settings. The sources do not describe what an attacker can achieve beyond the memory read and crash risk.
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.
Machines using Linux mac80211 Wi-Fi drivers that associate with access points advertising non-transmitted MBSSID profiles. Systems without mac80211 Wi-Fi, such as wired-only servers, can skip it. The sources do not say how an attacker would trigger the flawed path remotely.
No product ranges from the sources yet.
uname -r and compare against the kernel version that contains the upstream fix for CVE-2026-98704 (unknown in the sources)lsmod | grep mac80211Each 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: keep fallback association elements alive
Associating to a non-transmitted MBSSID profile reads freed memory while determining the operating channel and applying HT capabilities.
When an association response omits WMM, HT, or VHT information, ieee80211_assoc_config_link() parses the cached BSS IEs and copies the missing element pointers out of that fallback parse. For a non-transmitted MBSSID profile those pointers refer to merged-profile storage owned by the parse object, and the fallback block frees that object at its end. The copied pointers are used afterwards to determine the operating channel, configure bandwidth, and apply HT capabilities.
Keep the fallback parse result alive until association setup finishes.
[reorder variable declaration]
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