Bug 2546434 (CVE-2026-98307)

Summary: CVE-2026-98307 kernel: wifi: ath11k: cleanup arsta in ath11k_mac_peer_cleanup_all()
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
Status: NEW --- QA Contact:
Severity: low Docs Contact:
Priority: low    
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 ath11k wireless driver. This vulnerability can lead to a Denial of Service (DoS) through memory exhaustion. When recovering from a wireless firmware crash, the driver fails to free memory allocated for station statistics. An attacker or anomalous condition capable of triggering repeated firmware restarts can exploit this issue to progressively leak kernel memory, ultimately degrading performance or crashing the system.
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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 2026-10-06 09:20:18 UTC 
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

wifi: ath11k: cleanup arsta in ath11k_mac_peer_cleanup_all()

When mac80211 removes a sta, it calls .sta_state() which in turn calls
ath11k_mac_station_remove(). In that function we clean up both peers &
arsta related resources.

But when the firmware crashes, ath11k calls ieee80211_restart_hw(), which
assumes that all driver related resources are cleaned up beforehand. This
cleanup is supposedly done by ath11k_mac_peer_cleanup_all() but does not
in fact free arsta->rx_stats / tx_stats.

Extract the arsta cleanup from ath11k_mac_station_remove() into a
new ath11k_mac_station_cleanup() and call it from both there and
ath11k_mac_peer_cleanup_all().

This should handle kmemleaks reports like:
	unreferenced object 0xffffff801ae66400 (size 1024):
	  comm "hostapd", pid 1306, jiffies 4295011565
	  hex dump (first 32 bytes):
	    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
	    00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  ................
	  backtrace (crc d61c08ec):
	    kmemleak_alloc+0x3c/0x50
	    __kmalloc_cache_noprof+0x2b0/0x3e0
	    ath11k_mac_op_sta_state+0x1dc/0xb10
	    drv_sta_state+0xac/0x6f8
	    sta_info_insert_rcu+0x314/0x5e0
	    sta_info_insert+0x14/0x38
	    ieee80211_add_station+0x10c/0x1a0
	    nl80211_new_station+0x3e8/0x680
	    genl_family_rcv_msg_doit+0xc0/0x120
	    genl_rcv_msg+0x1b4/0x258
	    netlink_rcv_skb+0x4c/0x108
	    genl_rcv+0x38/0x60
	    netlink_unicast+0x190/0x278
	    netlink_sendmsg+0x15c/0x370
	    ____sys_sendmsg+0x120/0x290
	    ___sys_sendmsg+0x70/0xa0

Tested-on: QCN9074 hw1.0 PCI WLAN.HK.2.9.0.1-01977-QCAHKSWPL_SILICONZ-1
Comment 1 gkamathe 2026-10-11 04:48:46 UTC 
Upstream advisory:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/security/vulns.git/plain/cve/published/2026/CVE-2026-98307.mbox