Bug 2546516 (CVE-2026-98348)

Summary: CVE-2026-98348 kernel: wifi: libipw: reject too-short association responses
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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Doc Text:
A flaw was found in the Linux kernel's libipw wireless driver. An attacker within Wi-Fi range can exploit this flaw by transmitting a malformed, abnormally short association response frame. Due to an improper packet length calculation, the driver performs an out-of-bounds memory read, which can cause a kernel crash leading to a Denial of Service (DoS) or potentially expose sensitive memory contents.
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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 09:37:40 UTC
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

wifi: libipw: reject too-short association responses

libipw_handle_assoc_resp() reads the capability, status and aid fields
of the 30-byte association response prefix and then computes the
information element length as

	stats->len - sizeof(*frame)

stats->len is a u16 and sizeof() has type size_t, so the subtraction is
evaluated as size_t and wraps instead of going negative.  Truncating
that to the u16 length parameter of libipw_parse_info_param() turns a
frame shorter than the fixed fields into a length near 64 KiB, and the
parser then reads past the receive buffer.

Both the ipw2100 and ipw2200 management receive paths reach this
function having established only that the frame carries the generic
24-byte three-address header.

Reject the frame before any fixed field is touched.

Found by an AI-assisted review of length arithmetic in management frame
parsers.  Verified with a KUnit case under Generic KASAN on arm64 under
QEMU; I do not have the hardware, so it is not tested on a real device.