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CVE-2026-23444high

wifi: mac80211: always free skb on ieee80211_tx_prepare_skb() failure

21Vexday Risk Score

No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.

ssvc Trackcvss 7.8epss 0.1%
exploitation probability
0.1%top 97% of all CVEs
observed exploitation
nono source reports it
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: wifi: mac80211: always free skb on ieee80211_tx_prepare_skb() failure ieee80211_tx_prepare_skb() has three error paths, but only two of them free the skb. The first error path (ieee80211_tx_prepare() returning TX_DROP) does not free it, while invoke_tx_handlers() failure and the fragmentation check both do. Add kfree_skb() to the first error path so all three are consistent, and remove the now-redundant frees in callers (ath9k, mt76, mac80211_hwsim) to avoid double-free. Document the skb ownership guarantee in the function's kdoc.
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Affected products
Linux · Linux