CVE-2025-39746 wifi: ath10k: shutdown driver when hardware is unreliable
A flaw in the ath10k WiFi driver causes system crashes when hardware becomes unreliable, requiring a patch to prevent denial of service.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Any signed-in user
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2025-39746?
CVE-2025-39746 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Linux kernel, published on 11 Sep 2025. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:
wifi: ath10k: shutdown driver when hardware is unreliable
In rare cases, ath10k may lose connection with the PCIe bus due to some unknown reasons, which could further lead to system crashes during resuming due to watchdog timeout:
ath10k_pci 0000:01:00.0: wmi command 20486 timeout, restarting hardware ath10k_pci 0000:01:00.0: already restarting ath10k_pci 0000:01:00.0: failed to stop WMI vdev 0: -11 ath10k_pci 0000:01:00.0: failed to stop vdev 0: -11 ieee80211 phy0: PM: **** DPM device timeout **** Call Trace: panic+0x125/0x315 dpm_watchdog_set+0x54/0x54 dpm_watchdog_handler+0x57/0x57 call_timer_fn+0x31/0x13c
At this point, all WMI commands will timeout and attempt to restart device. So set a threshold for consecutive restart failures. If the threshold is exceeded, consider the hardware is unreliable and all ath10k operations should be skipped to avoid system crash.
fail_cont_count and pending_recovery are atomic variables, and do not involve complex conditional logic. Therefore, even if recovery check and reconfig complete are executed concurrently, the recovery mechanism will not be broken.
Tested-on: QCA6174 hw3.2 PCI WLAN.RM.4.4.1-00288-QCARMSWPZ-1
Which versions are affected by CVE-2025-39746?
It affects 1 product.
Products include Linux kernel.
How do I fix CVE-2025-39746?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.
Is CVE-2025-39746 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2025-39746 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel
Sources
Also known as AZL-67190, AZL-70813, BELL-CVE-2025-39746, DEBIAN-CVE-2025-39746, GHSA-jchh-jmm7-xg67, ROOT-OS-DEBIAN-11-CVE-2025-39746 and 4 more.