Bug 2546474 (CVE-2026-98186)

Summary: CVE-2026-98186 kernel: wifi: mwifiex: bound the pairwise-cipher OUI walk to the IE length
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
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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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: ---
Doc Text:
A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's mwifiex Wi-Fi driver. A nearby wireless attacker can exploit this vulnerability by broadcasting crafted Wi-Fi beacon or probe response frames containing an excessively large pairwise cipher count. Because the driver fails to validate this count against the frame element's actual length, it reads beyond the allocated buffer while processing scan results. This issue can cause a system crash, leading to a Denial of Service (DoS), or potentially disclose adjacent kernel memory.
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-10-06 09:26:59 UTC 
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

wifi: mwifiex: bound the pairwise-cipher OUI walk to the IE length

mwifiex_search_oui_in_ie() reads a pairwise-cipher (PTK) count from a
beacon/probe-response RSN or WPA information element and then walks that
many 4-byte OUIs, comparing each with memcmp(). The count comes straight
from the (attacker-supplied) IE and is never checked against the
element's own length, and the callers admit the element on element_id
alone (has_ieee_hdr() / has_vendor_hdr(), no length check). A crafted
RSN/WPA IE with a large pairwise count therefore makes the walk read up
to 255 * 4 bytes past the element -- an out-of-bounds read of the
kmemdup()'d beacon buffer, reachable from any AP whose beacon/probe
response is processed during scan-result parsing.

Pass the number of IE bytes available at the OUI list and bound the walk
to the element. Keep the length signed and reject a negative value
before any unsigned arithmetic, so a small or zero IE length cannot
underflow to a large size_t and defeat the bound.

Found by 0sec automated security-research tooling (https://0sec.ai).