wifi: mac80211: keep paired old chanctx alive

Overview

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

wifi: mac80211: keep paired old chanctx alive

An in-place replacement keeps reciprocal replace_ctx pointers between the old WILL_BE_REPLACED chanctx and the new REPLACES_OTHER chanctx. However, the early free paths only consider assigned and reserved link users when deciding whether to free the old chanctx.

That lets the old chanctx be freed too early while the replacement partner still points back to it, either when the last assigned link is released or when that link successfully reassigns to another existing context. Later unreserve and switch-finalization paths can then follow a stale replace_ctx pointer.

Keep a paired old chanctx alive until the replacement pair has been torn down. Apply the same check to both __ieee80211_link_release_channel() and ieee80211_link_use_reserved_reassign(). If the replacement is later abandoned, ieee80211_link_unreserve_chanctx() already tears down the pairing before freeing the old chanctx once no users remain.

Affected

• Linux >= 5bcae31d9cb1ebfad3ad5a3eea04c8cdc329a04f < 47864a9092fd6f6b3f312d1e5b233ecdc68b1bd8
• Linux >= 5bcae31d9cb1ebfad3ad5a3eea04c8cdc329a04f < 21a688cbeae0e682f03e91f1e7a7eedd60d9d4f2
• Linux >= 5bcae31d9cb1ebfad3ad5a3eea04c8cdc329a04f < 1c82d0c5d509179ba2a4edfa096f516aebf960b0
• Linux >= 5bcae31d9cb1ebfad3ad5a3eea04c8cdc329a04f < afd1cdd16a25c7185b812a612ab7d5f2cbd1e086
• Linux >= 5bcae31d9cb1ebfad3ad5a3eea04c8cdc329a04f < 3412e9a800786d1dec4a58367db1cba275e7ef11
• Linux 3.17

Remediation

Refer to the linked advisories for vendor-supplied fixes and affected version ranges.

Vendor advisories

• Red Hat VEX · Moderate · affected: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 · no fix planned: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 · updated 2026-10-21 · vex