Linux Kernel up to 7.2.9/7.3-rc5 mac80211 minstrel_ht_tx_status out-of-bounds

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability was found in Linux Kernel up to 7.2.9/7.3-rc5. It has been declared as very critical. This impacts the function minstrel_ht_tx_status of the component mac80211. Such manipulation leads to out-of-bounds. This vulnerability is documented as CVE-2026-98824. The attack can be executed remotely. There is not any exploit available. It is recommended to upgrade the affected component.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in Linux Kernel up to 7.2.9/7.3-rc5 and classified as very critical. Affected by this issue is the function minstrel_ht_tx_status of the component mac80211. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a out-of-bounds vulnerability. Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-125. The product reads data past the end, or before the beginning, of the intended buffer. Impacted is confidentiality, integrity, and availability. CVE summarizes:

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.

The advisory is available at git.kernel.org. This vulnerability is handled as CVE-2026-98824 since 09/25/2026. The exploitation is known to be easy. The attack may be launched remotely. No form of authentication is required for exploitation. Technical details are known, but there is no available exploit. The structure of the vulnerability defines a possible price range of USD $0-$5k at the moment (estimation calculated on 10/18/2026).

Upgrading to version 7.2.10 or 7.3-rc6 eliminates this vulnerability. Applying the patch b1961a61ab6fbe11f16f7f9b64c57a9908c6c3a8/6bdcdb31318c10e6369cff8e5b32c37397e98091 is able to eliminate this problem. The best possible mitigation is suggested to be upgrading to the latest version.

If you want to get best quality of vulnerability data, you may have to visit VulDB.

Productinfo

Type

• Operating System

Vendor

• Linux

Name

• Kernel

Version

• 7.2.0
• 7.2.1
• 7.2.2
• 7.2.3
• 7.2.4
• 7.2.5
• 7.2.6
• 7.2.7
• 7.2.8
• 7.2.9
• 7.3-rc1
• 7.3-rc2
• 7.3-rc3
• 7.3-rc4
• 7.3-rc5

License

• open-source

Website

• Vendor: https://www.kernel.org/

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CPE 2.2info

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Entryinfo

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