Live › vulnerability › CVE-2026-98829
Go to dashboardA u16 length counter in the mac80211 Wi-Fi defragmentation path wraps when a sequence of large fragments sums past 65535 bytes, so the kernel allocates too little buffer and then panics in softirq context. A malicious peer or rogue access point can trigger this with crafted fragmented frames, causing a kernel crash.
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 that receive 802.11 traffic through the mac80211 stack are exposed, which means Linux machines with Wi-Fi interfaces that use mac80211 drivers, including laptops, Wi-Fi routers and embedded devices running Linux. Wired-only servers and containers without a Wi-Fi radio are not reached by this path. unknown whether fragmentation handling is enabled by default in all configurations.
No product ranges from the sources yet.
uname -r and compare against the kernel version that carries the upstream fix; the sources do not list fixed versions.lsmod | grep mac80211.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: drop oversized fragments to avoid extra_len overflow
In ieee80211_rx_h_defragment(), fragment payloads are accumulated into entry->extra_len as subsequent fragments arrive:
entry->extra_len += rx->skb->len;
When the final fragment arrives, the head fragment is dequeued, and pskb_expand_head() is called with entry->extra_len to ensure sufficient tailroom for all queued fragments before copying:
if (skb_tailroom(rx->skb) < entry->extra_len) {
if (unlikely(pskb_expand_head(rx->skb, 0, entry->extra_len,
GFP_ATOMIC))) {
...
}
}
while ((skb = __skb_dequeue(&entry->skb_list))) {
skb_put_data(rx->skb, skb->data, skb->len);
dev_kfree_skb(skb);
}
In commit 69f132236827 ("mac80211: shrink struct ieee80211_fragment_entry"), entry->extra_len was narrowed from unsigned int to u16 in order to reduce structure memory footprint.
However, an IEEE 802.11 frame sequence can contain up to 16 fragments (frag numbers 0..15). If a sequence of large fragments arrives (e.g. from a malicious peer or rogue AP), the sum of fragment lengths can exceed 65535 bytes (for example, 15 fragments of 4400 bytes total 66000 bytes). Because extra_len is a u16, this addition overflows and wraps around modulo 65536 (e.g. 66000 wraps to 464).
Consequently, pskb_expand_head() allocates only the truncated amount of tailroom (or is skipped entirely if the head fragment already has >= 464 bytes of tailroom). When skb_put_data() subsequently iterates through the queued skb list, it appends the full payload into the undersized buffer, causing skb_put() to trigger skb_over_panic() and crash the kernel in softirq context.
A legitimate MSDU in IEEE 802.11 is at most 2304 bytes (or up to 7935/11454 bytes for A-MSDU, which is not fragmented), well below U16_MAX.
Fix this without increasing the size of struct ieee80211_fragment_entry by checking whether adding the incoming fragment length would exceed U16_MAX. If so, purge the queued fragments and drop the frame.
[assign a separate drop reason]
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