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Intel iwlwifi EUVDEUVD-2026-86072

| CVE-2026-97474 HIGH
2026-09-24 Linux GHSA-cmqg-p6gh-rwg2
7.4
CVSS 3.1 · Vendor: Linux
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Attack ChainAIDerived

Hypothetical attack flow derived from CVE metadata – not a confirmed exploit chain

  1. Access
    Local access to WiFi-capable host
  2. Delivery
    Establish concurrent BSS and NAN connections
  3. Exploit
    Firmware error triggers reconfig recovery
  4. Execution
    NAN restore fails, mac80211 frees BSS links
  5. Persist
    async handler dereferences dangling link pointer
  6. Impact
    Kernel panic / denial of service

Vulnerability Assessment

Exploitation Conditions

Requires the Intel iwlwifi mld driver with two simultaneous active connections - a BSS (infrastructure) connection AND a NAN (neighbor awareness networking) connection - on the affected host. Exploitation is gated on a firmware error occurring (step 3), after which the reconfig recovery path fails to restore the NAN connection; the firmware error is not something a remote attacker reliably controls. Limiting factors: local vector (AV:L), high attack complexity due to the specific ordering/race between async_handlers_wk and reconfig work (AC:H), the need for a NAN-capable/configured setup, and dependence on a spontaneous or induced FW fault - all of which make deliberate triggering difficult and confine impact to a kernel panic.

Impact

This is a use-after-free (dangling pointer) kernel panic in the Intel iwlwifi 'mld' (multi-link device) driver, triggered on the firmware-error/reconfig-failure recovery path. The NVD CVSS of 7.4 (AV:L/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/C:H/I:H/A:H) overstates real-world risk: the C:H/I:H claims are inflated for what the description makes clear is a kernel panic (availability/DoS outcome), and PR:N is generous given the trigger requires local control over WiFi interface state (bringing up concurrent BSS + NAN connections). No EPSS score, no CISA KEV listing, and no public POC are present in the input - the signals are 'no public exploit identified at time of analysis'. Critically, the root trigger is a spontaneous firmware error (step 3 of the description), which is not directly attacker-controlled; the bug is a reliability/robustness fix (purging stale notifications from a dead FW) rather than a practically weaponizable vector. Conflicting signal to flag: the Tags list this as 'Information Disclosure', but the mechanism (freed link dereferenced → panic) is memory corruption / denial-of-service, not disclosure. Net: real fix worth patching for stability, but low practical exploitation priority.

Exploit ScenarioDerived

A local user or a flaky/malicious Intel WiFi adapter induces a firmware error while both a BSS connection and a NAN connection are active. During mac80211 reconfig recovery the NAN restore fails, links are freed, and a queued asynchronous statistics-notification handler dereferences the now-dangling fw_id_to_bss_conf[id], panicking the kernel. No public exploit code is identified; realistic outcome is a denial-of-service crash rather than code execution or data theft.

This Week Schedule remediation this week. Why: HIGH severity (CVSS 7.0-8.9).
Patch available 0.1% exploitation probability (EPSS)

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AnalysisAIv1 – Sep 25, 2026

Kernel panic and denial of service in the Intel iwlwifi 'mld' (multi-link device) driver stem from a use-after-free on the firmware-error recovery path. Hosts are affected only when the MLD driver is loaded and two connections are active at once - an infrastructure BSS link plus a NAN (neighbor awareness networking) link - and a firmware error forces a reconfig that restores the BSS link but fails to restore the NAN link; mac80211 then frees the BSS link's data while a queued async statistics notification still holds a dangling fw_id_to_bss_conf[] pointer, so the workqueue handler dereferences freed memory and panics the kernel. Local access to the machine is required, the race between async_handlers_wk and the reconfig work makes deliberate triggering complex, and no public exploit identified at time of analysis, with no confirmed actively exploited (CISA KEV) status; vendor patches are available in Linux 6.18.53 and 7.2.

RemediationAI

Vendor-released patch: Linux 6.18.53 (stable) and Linux 7.2 (mainline), delivered by the upstream commits a40ad60a47f7c904b75a9ff83b39edebf3961c85 and 1b3b7b521041d55459f8457db8921e9778482063 (see https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a40ad60a47f7c904b75a9ff83b39edebf3961c85 and https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/1b3b7b521041d55459f8457db8921e9778482063, plus the NVD entry https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-97474); update the kernel on affected Intel Wi-Fi hosts to 6.18.53 or later and reboot, and confirm the iwlwifi-mld module matches the patched build. Where the update cannot be applied immediately, compensating controls are narrow: avoid running a NAN (Wi-Fi Aware) connection concurrently with an infrastructure/BSS connection on iwlwifi-mld hardware, and disable NAN-capable interfaces or NAN-related userspace services (e.g. Wi-Fi Aware discovery) so the reconfig path cannot free a link still referenced by a queued notification - the trade-off is loss of Wi-Fi Aware functionality and any proximity service depending on it. There is no safe way to block or rate-limit the trigger at network level because the fault is a local driver/kernel path, so restricting local login on sensitive hosts (limiting who can induce reconfig, reload the module, or drive test tooling) is a secondary, partial mitigation with operational cost; firmware updates alone do not remove the kernel-side use-after-free, and monitoring dmesg for iwlwifi firmware-error/reconfig messages can indicate hosts most likely to hit the panicking path.

Affected VersionsENISA

Linux patch: 7.2
Linux patch: 6.18.53
Linux 0 <6.18.53
Linux 1da177e4c3f41524e886b7f1b8a0c1fc7321cac2 <a40ad60a47f7c904b75a9ff83b39edebf3961c85
Linux 1da177e4c3f41524e886b7f1b8a0c1fc7321cac2 <1b3b7b521041d55459f8457db8921e9778482063

Affected Packages

euvd linux fix: 6.18.53

Source: OSV (Open Source Vulnerabilities)

Affects your stack

Affects 1 package in euvd

Checking this CVE against your own stacks and servers is part of the Basic plan and up.

Technical ContextAI · show details

The flaw lives in the Intel wireless stack: the iwlwifi 'mld' driver (drivers/net/wireless/intel/iwlwifi/mld) paired with mac80211 link management in the Linux kernel, tracked by CPE cpe:2.3:a:linux:linux:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*. Multi-link operation lets one virtual interface hold multiple links (here a BSS/infrastructure link and a NAN link). On a NIC/firmware error, the transport notifies the driver and a reconfig work item attempts to restore existing connections; mac80211 keeps per-link state in fw_id_to_bss_conf[] indices, and asynchronous firmware notifications (statistics, handled by async_handlers_wk) are normally purged when the firmware is stopped. In the failure sequence the firmware is stopped too late - after mac80211 has already freed the BSS link because ieee80211_handle_reconfig_failure was invoked erroneously - so the queued async handler resolves an fw_id to a dangling bss_conf pointer and panics on first field access. The root-cause class is a use-after-free / dangling pointer (CWE-416) compounded by an ordering race (CWE-362) between the reconfig work and the async notification workqueue; no CWE was supplied in the feed, and the impact class is availability, with our assessment rating integrity low and confidentiality none. The upstream fix purges queued notifications immediately when the transport reports a NIC error (and the same series refs the separate correction to the erroneous ieee80211_handle_reconfig_failure call).

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Severity by source

Vendor (Linux) PRIMARY 7.4 HIGH
AV:L/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
vuln.today AI 5.3 MEDIUM

Local trigger requiring configured BSS+NAN connections and an uncontrolled FW-error race (AV:L/AC:H/PR:L); outcome is a kernel panic so A:H with no confidentiality and only incidental integrity impact.

3.1 AV:L/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:H
4.0 AV:L/AC:H/AT:P/PR:L/UI:N/VC:N/VI:L/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
SUSE 7.8 HIGH
AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
Red Hat 5.5 MEDIUM

Primary rating from Vendor (Linux).

CVSS VectorVendor: Linux

Attack Vector
Local
Attack Complexity
High
Privileges Required
None
User Interaction
None
Scope
Unchanged
Confidentiality
High
Integrity
High
Availability
High

Lifecycle Timeline

4
CVSS changed
Sep 25, 2026 - 05:23 NVD
7.4 (HIGH)
Patch available
Sep 24, 2026 - 17:03 EUVD
CVE Published
Sep 24, 2026 - 16:04 cve.org
HIGH 7.4
CVE Published
Sep 24, 2026 - 16:04 cve.org
UNKNOWN (no severity yet)

DescriptionCVE.org

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).

  1. 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.

  1. in ieee80211_stop_device, *ALL* wiphy works are getting flushed

(erroneously?)

  1. Therefore, async_handlers_wk is being executed, processing the

statistics notification that was received after we restored the BSS connection.

  1. the notification handler dereferences fw_id_to_bss_conf[id], which is

now a dangling pointer, as mac80211 already freed this link in (7).

  1. 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.

Executive ViewAI

Why It Matters

Intel's iwlwifi MLD driver for Linux contains a memory-safety flaw that can cause affected hosts to crash and lose wireless availability. The issue requires local access and a complex wireless configuration, and no public exploit identified at time of analysis, so the immediate business risk is localized endpoint disruption rather than widespread remote compromise. Leadership should direct patching of Linux systems with Intel Wi-Fi to vendor-fixed kernel versions and monitor for unexpected wireless-related outages.

Business Impact: High
Compensating Controls

Apply vendor patch.

Threat Intelligence Overview

EPSS Score
0.1%
Top 98% exploitable
Prevalence
High
Intel iwlwifi is a ubiquitous laptop WiFi driver, though the mld multi-link component is newer
Data Quality
4 sources
Confidence: Medium

How this decision was reached

The engine reads each signal below and applies a fixed list of rules from top to bottom. The first rule that matches sets the recommended action – like a statement, every line is shown.

SignalValue
Severity HIGH
CISA KEV No
Public POC No
EPSS 0.1%
Patch available Yes
Active threat No
Deciding rule
HIGH severity (CVSS 7.0-8.9)
What every action level means
Emergency Immediate action required. Criteria: CRITICAL + in CISA KEV (actively exploited) without patch, OR CRITICAL + EPSS > 30% without patch, OR CRITICAL + active threat signals without patch.
Act Now Prioritize within 24-48h. Criteria: in KEV with patch available, OR CRITICAL + public POC, OR HIGH + EPSS > 10%, OR CRITICAL + active threat, OR any CRITICAL severity.
This Week Schedule remediation this week. Criteria: HIGH severity (CVSS 7.0-8.9). Patch within normal change window.
This Month Plan within 30 days. Criteria: MEDIUM severity (CVSS 4.0-6.9), lower exploitation probability. Include in regular patch cycle.
Monitor Track and reassess. Criteria: LOW severity (CVSS 0.1-3.9), minimal exploitation risk. No immediate action needed.

SSVC AssessmentENISA

SSVC Decision· derived
Defer
Exploitation· derived
None
System Exposure· derived
Small
Automatable· derived
No
Human Impact
High

Priority Score

37
Low Medium High Critical
KEV: 0
EPSS: 0
CVSS: +37
PoC: 0
Weaponized: 0
Threat intel: 0
Gov advisory: 0

Vendor StatusVendor

SUSE

Severity: Important
Product Status
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 15 SP7 Not-Affected
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 15 SP7 Not-Affected
SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 15 SP7 Not-Affected
SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 15 SP7 Not-Affected
SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension 16.0 Not-Affected

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