CVE-2026-97518 wifi: cfg80211: reject duplicate wiphy cipher suite entries
A local attacker can trigger a buffer overflow in the Linux kernel WiFi subsystem by providing duplicate cipher suite entries, causing a 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-2026-97518?
CVE-2026-97518 is a 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: cfg80211: reject duplicate wiphy cipher suite entries
Duplicate entries in wiphy->cipher_suites do not describe any additional capability, but cfg80211 currently accepts them and leaves individual consumers to deal with them.
One such consumer is the WEXT compatibility code, which appends a WEP key length for each WEP cipher entry it sees. Repeated WEP entries can therefore overflow the fixed iw_range::encoding_size array returned by SIOCGIWRANGE.
Reject duplicate cipher suite entries in wiphy_register() instead. This keeps the cipher suite invariant in one place and makes malformed wiphy descriptions fail early with -EINVAL, rather than relying on a single cfg80211 user to handle duplicates correctly.
Which versions are affected by CVE-2026-97518?
How do I fix CVE-2026-97518?
Apply the vendor's patch.
Is CVE-2026-97518 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2026-97518 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Sources
Also known as AZL-103592, BELL-CVE-2026-97518, DEBIAN-CVE-2026-97518, GHSA-q434-f3vh-rmc4, UBUNTU-CVE-2026-97518.