CVE Catalog

CVE-2026-64175

HighCVSS 7.5
Published: Updated: Translated: NVD NIST

Exploitation Probability (EPSS)

Low risk
0.35%

28th percentile - higher than 28% of all known CVEs

Summary

In the iwlwifi driver for Intel BE201 Wi-Fi 7 chipsets, a vulnerability was found where transmission is not stopped during firmware restart. After a firmware crash (e.g., NMI_INTERRUPT_UNKNOWN), the driver continues sending frames that are rejected, causing high CPU load and memory fragmentation.

Risk Assessment

The organization faces system performance degradation and potential memory exhaustion due to intensive network buffer allocation, especially under high traffic (e.g., Tailscale, SSH). This could lead to system or critical service crashes.

Recommendation

Immediately update the Linux kernel to a version containing the fix (commit adding in_hw_restart flag check in iwl_mld_tx_from_txq()). Monitor firmware crash logs and apply the security patch.

Other vulnerabilities in Linux kernel

See all
Original NVD description (English source)

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: wifi: iwlwifi: mld: stop TX during firmware restart When iwlwifi firmware crashes (e.g., NMI_INTERRUPT_UNKNOWN on Intel BE201/Wi-Fi 7), iwl_mld_nic_error() sets mld->fw_status.in_hw_restart to true. However, iwl_mld_tx_from_txq() does not check this flag before dequeuing frames from mac80211 and pushing them to the transport layer. Since the firmware is dead, iwl_trans_tx() returns -EIO for each frame, which then gets freed immediately. Under high-throughput conditions (e.g., Tailscale UDP traffic or active SSH sessions), this creates a tight dequeue-send-fail-free loop that wastes CPU cycles and generates rapid skb allocation churn, leading to memory pressure from slab fragmentation. The RX path already has this guard (iwl_mld_rx_mpdu checks in_hw_restart at rx.c:1906), and so does the TXQ allocation worker (iwl_mld_add_txqs_wk at tx.c:156). Add the same guard to iwl_mld_tx_from_txq() to stop all TX during firmware restart. Frames left in mac80211's TXQs are naturally drained after restart completes, when queue reallocation triggers iwl_mld_tx_from_txq() via iwl_mld_add_txq_list(), or when new upper-layer traffic invokes wake_tx_queue. Tested on ASUS Zenbook 14 UX3405CA with Intel BE201 (Wi-Fi 7) on kernel 6.19.5 where the firmware crashes approximately every 10-15 minutes under Tailscale traffic.

Vulnerability data from NVD (NIST) · CISA KEV · EPSS