Bug 2540382 (CVE-2026-97518)

Summary: CVE-2026-97518 kernel: wifi: cfg80211: reject duplicate wiphy cipher suite entries
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security <prodsec-ir-bot>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedCC: akhatavk, aos-team-art-private, asdas, dpaolell, jdelft, jupierce, lgarciaa, mbiarnes, ppalepu, ppostler, prdhamdh, rhel-process-autobot, sghai, sidsharm, suppawar, vlaad, watson-tool-maintainers
Target Milestone: ---Keywords: Security
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
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Doc Text:
A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's cfg80211 wireless configuration subsystem. The subsystem fails to reject duplicate cipher suite entries during wireless device registration. This flaw allows a local user to cause an array buffer overflow within the Wireless Extensions (WEXT) compatibility layer, leading to memory corruption and a Denial of Service (DoS) via a system crash.
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-09-24 16:36:02 UTC 
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

wifi: cfg80211: reject duplicate wiphy cipher suite entries

Duplicate entries in wiphy->cipher_suites do not describe any
additional capability, but cfg80211 currently accepts them and leaves
individual consumers to deal with them.

One such consumer is the WEXT compatibility code, which appends a WEP
key length for each WEP cipher entry it sees. Repeated WEP entries can
therefore overflow the fixed iw_range::encoding_size array returned by
SIOCGIWRANGE.

Reject duplicate cipher suite entries in wiphy_register() instead.
This keeps the cipher suite invariant in one place and makes malformed
wiphy descriptions fail early with -EINVAL, rather than relying on a
single cfg80211 user to handle duplicates correctly.
Comment 1 gkamathe 2026-09-28 17:25:59 UTC 
Upstream advisory:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/security/vulns.git/plain/cve/published/2026/CVE-2026-97518.mbox