Live › vulnerability › CVE-2026-98824
Go to dashboardIn the Linux kernel's mac80211 Wi-Fi stack, rate metadata reported in a transmit status was not validated before minstrel_ht used it as a table index. A malformed report can cause an out-of-bounds read or write in kernel memory.
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.
Systems running a Linux kernel with mac80211 Wi-Fi drivers and the minstrel_ht rate control algorithm, which is the default rate control for many HT/VHT-capable Wi-Fi adapters. Machines without a mac80211 Wi-Fi device, or that do not use the affected code path, are unlikely to be exposed. The sources do not say which kernel versions are fixed.
No product ranges from the sources yet.
Each 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: validate TX status rate metadata
minstrel_ht_tx_status() converts the HT/VHT rate reported in a TX status into a group and rate index and uses those to index the minstrel_ht rate tables. The existing validation only checked that an entry was present and had tries recorded; it did not check that the reported MCS, spatial stream count and bandwidth are representable by the tables, so malformed metadata passed to minstrel_ht_get_stats() or minstrel_ht_ri_get_stats() could be used as an out-of-bounds index.
Validate the rate metadata in the common TX status path instead of only in minstrel_ht, since the values are used by more than rate control. The legacy ieee80211_tx_rate array and the rate_info based entries are sanitized in ieee80211_tx_status_ext() and ieee80211_tx_rate_update() before any consumer runs: an entry that does not describe a valid rate for its encoding is dropped. minstrel_ht keeps the checks that depend on its own tables, i.e. the supported number of spatial streams, the MCS group size and the supported bandwidths.
This does not take away the driver's responsibility to report sane values, it only prevents a single bad report from corrupting mac80211 state. No WARN_ON() is added: with panic_on_warn a driver bug would otherwise turn into a denial of service.
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