Linux Kernel Vulnerability Affects Wifi Cipher Suite Management

CVE-2026-97518

What is CVE-2026-97518?

The Linux kernel contains a vulnerability related to the management of wifi cipher suites in the cfg80211 subsystem. This issue arises due to the acceptance of duplicate entries in the wiphy->cipher_suites, which do not provide any additional capability but may lead to incorrect handling by various consumers of this data. For instance, the WEXT compatibility layer can append WEP key lengths for each WEP cipher, causing potential overflow in the fixed iw_range::encoding_size array. The fix involves rejecting such duplicates early in the wiphy_register() process, streamlining error handling and preventing malformed wiphy descriptions from leading to system errors.

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