CVE-2026-97474: wifi: iwlwifi: mld: purge async notifications upon nic error
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
wifi: iwlwifi: mld: purge async notifications upon nic error
This fixes a kernel panic in reconfig failure:
1. we have a BSS connection 2. we have a NAN connection 3. FW error occurs 4. reconfig restores the BSS connection 5. however, restoring the NAN connection fails due to a FW error. 6. erroneously, ieee80211handlereconfigfailure is called and marks all interfaces as not-in-driver (will be fixed in a different patch). 7. mac80211 frees the links of the BSS connection but doesn't tell the driver about that, as it thinks that this vif is not in the driver. 8. in ieee80211stopdevice, ALL wiphy works are getting flushed (erroneously?) 9. Therefore, asynchandlerswk is being executed, processing the statistics notification that was received after we restored the BSS connection. 10. the notification handler dereferences fwidtobssconf[id], which is now a dangling pointer, as mac80211 already freed this link in (7). 11. On the first access to one of the links fields, we panic.
While this can and should be fixed by removing the call to ieee80211handlereconfigfailure in (6), it is also not a good idea to carry and maybe handle notifications from a dead FW.
We do purge the notifications when we stop the FW, but in reconfig failure we stop the FW too late, after the notifications are processed. In addition, asynchandlerswk can always be scheduled before the reconfig work.
Purge the notifications immediately when transport notifies about a nic error.
Affected Software
Event History
Frequently Asked Questions
Which deployments are exposed to this failure scenario?
The described path requires the Linux kernel iwlwifi MLD driver with both an active BSS connection and a NAN connection. It occurs when firmware errors happen during reconfiguration and restoration of the NAN connection then fails.
What is the observed impact when the issue is triggered?
The kernel can panic when an asynchronous statistics notification is processed after mac80211 has freed BSS link data. The notification handler dereferences a dangling fw_id_to_bss_conf entry.
How can administrators recognize a potentially related crash?
A potentially related event is a kernel panic during Wi-Fi reconfiguration following firmware errors, particularly where a BSS connection is restored but NAN restoration fails. The failure involves asynchronous notification handling after device shutdown or reconfiguration failure processing.