CVE-2026-97474 wifi: iwlwifi: mld: purge async notifications upon nic error
A use-after-free in the iwlwifi driver causes a kernel panic when handling async notifications after a NIC error, leading to denial of service.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Not needed
- Attackable
- Local or same network only
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2026-97474?
CVE-2026-97474 is a high-severity use after free vulnerability in Linux, published on 24 Sep 2026. 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: 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, ieee80211_handle_reconfig_failure 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 ieee80211_stop_device, *ALL* wiphy works are getting flushed (erroneously?) 9. Therefore, async_handlers_wk is being executed, processing the statistics notification that was received after we restored the BSS connection. 10. the notification handler dereferences fw_id_to_bss_conf[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 ieee80211_handle_reconfig_failure 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, async_handlers_wk can always be scheduled before the reconfig work.
Purge the notifications immediately when transport notifies about a nic error.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-97474?
How do I fix CVE-2026-97474?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Upgrade to the fixed version. These bugs are found with fuzzing and sanitisers and avoided by memory-safe languages. More about Use after free.
Is CVE-2026-97474 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-97474 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as AZL-104015, BELL-CVE-2026-97474, DEBIAN-CVE-2026-97474, GHSA-cmqg-p6gh-rwg2, UBUNTU-CVE-2026-97474.