Bug 2555194 (CVE-2026-98704)

Summary: CVE-2026-98704 kernel: wifi: mac80211: keep fallback association elements alive
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 mac80211 wireless subsystem. When associating with a wireless network profile that omits certain configuration parameters, the system prematurely frees internal data structures and subsequently reads the freed memory during connection setup. A malicious access point or an attacker within wireless range can exploit this use-after-free condition to cause a Denial of Service (DoS) through a kernel crash or potentially expose sensitive kernel memory.
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-10-18 16:00:10 UTC 
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

wifi: mac80211: keep fallback association elements alive

Associating to a non-transmitted MBSSID profile reads freed memory while
determining the operating channel and applying HT capabilities.

When an association response omits WMM, HT, or VHT information,
ieee80211_assoc_config_link() parses the cached BSS IEs and copies the
missing element pointers out of that fallback parse. For a
non-transmitted MBSSID profile those pointers refer to merged-profile
storage owned by the parse object, and the fallback block frees that
object at its end. The copied pointers are used afterwards to determine
the operating channel, configure bandwidth, and apply HT capabilities.

Keep the fallback parse result alive until association setup finishes.

[reorder variable declaration]
Comment 1 Mauro Matteo Cascella 2026-10-22 09:37:30 UTC 
Upstream advisory:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/security/vulns.git/plain/cve/published/2026/CVE-2026-98704.mbox