CVE-2026-98829 — wifi: mac80211: drop oversized fragments to avoid extra_len overflow

Affected: Linux

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

wifi: mac80211: drop oversized fragments to avoid extra_len overflow

In ieee80211_rx_h_defragment(), fragment payloads are accumulated into entry->extra_len as subsequent fragments arrive:

entry->extra_len += rx->skb->len;

When the final fragment arrives, the head fragment is dequeued, and pskb_expand_head() is called with entry->extra_len to ensure sufficient tailroom for all queued fragments before copying:

if (skb_tailroom(rx->skb) < entry->extra_len) { if (unlikely(pskb_expand_head(rx->skb, 0, entry->extra_len, GFP_ATOMIC))) { ... } } while ((skb = __skb_dequeue(&entry->skb_list))) { skb_put_data(rx->skb, skb->data, skb->len); dev_kfree_skb(skb); }

In commit 69f132236827 ("mac80211: shrink struct ieee80211_fragment_entry"), entry->extra_len was narrowed from unsigned int to u16 in order to reduce structure memory footprint.

However, an IEEE 802.11 frame sequence can contain up to 16 fragments (frag numbers 0..15). If a sequence of large fragments arrives (e.g. from a malicious peer or rogue AP), the sum of fragment lengths can exceed 65535 bytes (for example, 15 fragments of 4400 bytes total 66000 bytes). Because extra_len is a u16, this addition overflows and wraps around modulo 65536 (e.g. 66000 wraps to 464).

Consequently,…

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CVE-2026-98829 — wifi: mac80211: drop oversized fragments to avoid extra_len overflow