Live › vulnerability › CVE-2026-98827
Go to dashboardThe ath9k_htc driver for Atheros USB Wi-Fi adapters can copy more bytes than its transmit buffer holds when aggregating large frames, writing past the allocation in kernel memory. The sources do not say what an attacker can do with the overflow beyond memory corruption.
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 the ath9k_htc driver and a USB Atheros Wi-Fi adapter, where large frames such as MTU 2304 are sent. Systems without this USB Wi-Fi hardware or driver are not affected. The sources do not say whether the flaw is reachable remotely.
No product ranges from the sources yet.
uname -r to see the running kernel versionlsmod | grep ath9k_htc to check whether the driver is loadedmodprobe -r ath9k_htc if no USB ath9k_htc adapter is in useEach 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: ath9k_htc: bound TX aggregation to MAX_TX_BUF_SIZE
__hif_usb_tx() dequeues up to MAX_TX_AGGR_NUM (20) frames into a single tx_buf of MAX_TX_BUF_SIZE (32768) bytes, limiting the batch by record count but never by cumulative byte length.
With large frames (MTU 2304), 20 aggregated frames of 2292 bytes each exceed the allocation (20 * 2296 = 45920 bytes), so the memcpy() in the loop writes up to 13152 bytes past tx_buf->buf before usb_submit_urb().
Peek the queue head and stop before copying any record that would cross MAX_TX_BUF_SIZE, then dispatch the current batch. Leftover skbs remain queued and are drained on the next URB completion.
The byte bound changes the loop's exit semantics: it can now exit before i == tx_skb_cnt - 1. Stock only finalized tx_buf->len on that last index (len += offset), so an early break would submit a URB holding only the last record's length while every dequeued skb is freed on completion, silently dropping frames. Make tx_buf->len a running total and advance tx_buf->offset per record instead; the stride round_up(nskb->len + 4, 4) is identical to the stock stride when the loop runs to completion.
Tested on hardware with an MTU 2304 flood: the loop stops at record 15 (len = 32144, offset = 32144, within 32768), no oversized URB is submitted, and MTU 1500 pings pass 20/20.
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