From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: AL-KERNEL To: kernel-cve@kernelcve.org Subject: [CVE-2026-98936][LOW] wifi: ath11k: reset ar->num_stations on hardware start [ Upstream Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2026 17:06:53 -0400 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-AL-KERNEL-CVE: CVE-2026-98936 X-AL-KERNEL-Priority: LOW X-AL-KERNEL-Severity: LOW X-AL-KERNEL-Base-Severity: LOW X-AL-KERNEL-KPANIC: NO X-AL-KERNEL-ActionableScore: 1 X-AL-KERNEL-ActionableScore-Lower: unknown X-AL-KERNEL-Commit: 60142eb2afda34508e640a3ff2a54c90e51525cc List-Id: CVE: CVE-2026-98936 Priority: LOW AL-KERNEL base severity: LOW KPANIC flag: NO Patch: wifi: ath11k: reset ar->num_stations on hardware start [ Upstream Commit: 60142eb2afda34508e640a3ff2a54c90e51525cc Upstream patch: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/commit/?id=60142eb2afda34508e640a3ff2a54c90e51525cc Original CVE announcement: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/?q=CVE-2026-98936 Analysis date: Mon, 26 Oct 2026 17:06:53 -0400 ActionableScore: 1 ActionableScore lower bound: unknown Actionable bucket: Ordinary Moderate Manual review required: NO Summary: ath11k fails to reset station accounting across repeated hardware restarts, eventually rejecting new peers without demonstrated memory corruption or attacker-controlled restart reachability. ====================================================================== ABOUT THIS REPORT ====================================================================== The original Linux kernel CVE announcement for CVE-2026-98936 is available here: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/?q=CVE-2026-98936 The original announcement does not normally provide a security severity estimate, CVSS assessment, or enough information to determine whether the reported kernel bug represents a practically relevant security issue. This report was generated by AL-KERNEL, an AI-assisted Linux kernel vulnerability analysis system developed by Alexander Larkin. It combines an autonomous classifier with LLM-assisted technical analysis and a separate ActionableScore mechanism. The purpose of this report is to prioritize Linux kernel CVEs before manual review, identify cases that require prompt investigation, and support automatic closure of issues that are unlikely to have meaningful security impact. Published priority for this report: LOW Manual review required: NO A detailed explanation of the methodology and priority rules is included at the end of this message. ====================================================================== AL-KERNEL CLASSIFICATION RESULT ====================================================================== CVE-2026-98936 LOW https://www.kernelcve.org/list/?q=CVE-2026-98936 CHECK WITH IMPACT FROM ORIG NN MODERATE | AEGIS IMPACT MODERATE AEGIS_AS=0 LEGACY=LOW RESULT=DIFF (final Legacy and Aegis differ; FINAL: LOW, Aegis: MODERATE) Maybe valid. Check manually. Hints by AL-KERNEL: The best (paranoid) CVSS is 'AV:A/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H';CWE-665;CWE-682;*CWE-664;Other CVSS 'AV:L/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L';BEST CVSS score: '5.3';DESCR 'This is an ath11k state accounting logic bug with no demonstrated memory corruption primitive. After multiple hardware restarts the stale num_stations value can reach the station limit and cause the driver to reject new stations or mesh peers while existing accounting no longer reflects active hardware state. For the CVSS the PR:N value in the paranoid vector assumes that a nearby attacker can induce repeated recovery events through a separate wireless or firmware fault. This adjacent trigger is not established by the patch, so the grounded impact is limited to WiFi availability and there is no evidence of confidentiality or integrity impact. Automated impact decision path. The original SimpleNet classifier selected MODERATE_KPANIC. The primary LLM estimated paranoid CVSS 5.3 and the production ActionableScore returned 1 with recommendation Ordinary Moderate. The production rules then evaluated CVSS thresholds and ActionableScore thresholds. Recorded rule transitions were CVSS and initial triage stage MODERATE_KPANIC to MODERATE because the CVSS score, vector or bug class threshold rule was applied. ActionableScore thresholds stage MODERATE to LOW because the ActionableScore threshold rule was applied. final reconciliation stage LOW to LOW because KP specialist did not establish a qualifying panic and the cross model evidence reconciliation rule was applied. The legacy KP specialist has no review artifact for this run. The legacy FD or DH downgrade specialist has no review artifact for this run. Exact triggered rule markers were DECREASED_TO_MODERATE_REGULAR_FROM_MODERATE7_BASED_ON_GUESSCVSS_AND_CIANNH and DECREASED_TO_LOW_FROM_MODERATE_BASED_ON_ACTIONABLESCORELESSTHAN3 and KPANIC_UNSUPPORTED_REMOVED and V64_AEGIS_UNSUPPORTED_PROMOTION_BLOCKED. The independent weaker Aegis shadow evaluated CVSS 0.0 and ActionableScore 0 with primitive class CLASS_C and manual review REQUIRED. Its independently reconciled impact was MODERATE. The models disagreed but the aggregation rules retained the production result. The final reported impact is LOW.';NO MANUAL CHECK; ,and ActionableScore result is Ordinary Moderate (with actual score 1) MAYBE REMOTE NETWORK HARDWARE LINUS DECREASED_TO_MODERATE_REGULAR_FROM_MODERATE7_BASED_ON_GUESSCVSS_AND_CIANNH DECREASED_TO_LOW_FROM_MODERATE_BASED_ON_ACTIONABLESCORELESSTHAN3 KPANIC_UNSUPPORTED_REMOVED V64_AEGIS_UNSUPPORTED_PROMOTION_BLOCKED - - checked ====================================================================== ACTIONABLESCORE ANALYSIS ====================================================================== ActionableScore=1 PrimitiveClass=NONE RealUAF=NO HostAdminRequired=UNKNOWN NamespaceScopedPrivilege=UNKNOWN ImportantCandidate=NO ManualReview=NO AutoDowngradeAllowed=YES RequiresHostUID0=UNKNOWN AuthorizationDecisionBypass=NO ProtectedResourceImpact=NONE B4PendingReview=NO B4PendingConfirmed=NO 1. ActionableScore * Raw base score: 1. * Conservative score: 1. * Raw paranoid score: 1. * Paranoid score: 1; unsupported attacker-induced restart assumptions add no points. * Final recommended bucket: **Ordinary Moderate**:: 2. Signal breakdown * +1 availability impact: stale `num_stations` accounting after multiple hardware restarts eventually makes ath11k reject new stations or mesh peers. * No crash point: the evidence shows a warning and WiFi association failure, not a kernel panic or host-wide fatal fault. * No corruption point: the patch resets an ordinary accounting counter; no heap/slab OOB write, UAF, overwrite, pointer corruption, or lifetime violation is shown. * B5-R does not apply: there is retry/restart accumulation, but no confirmed OOB write or subsequent consumption of OOB-corrupted structured state. * No remote/adjacent reachability point: attacker control over hardware recovery events is speculative. * No C/I, authorization-bypass, or protected-resource impact is shown. 3. Reachability analysis The complete trigger requires multiple ath11k hardware restart/recovery events. The supplied evidence does not establish whether an adjacent wireless actor, local user, firmware fault, or host administrator can deliberately induce those events. No namespace capability path, prior delegated interface, special privilege check, or complete below-host-admin trigger is demonstrated. QCN9074 hardware is involved, but no hardware penalty is applied because rarity is not established. This is accumulated state across restarts, not a demonstrated attacker-controllable timing race. 4. Primitive and severity reading The defect is stale device accounting: `num_stations` survives hardware restart while related counters are reset, and later station admission checks consume the inflated count. The shown consequence is device-local WiFi availability loss. It is not an active-state corruption primitive under V33 because no attacker-influenced corrupt write is shown. PrimitiveClass is NONE; stronger effects such as kernel memory corruption, panic, authorization bypass, or attacker-induced denial of service remain unsupported. Important review preservation is therefore unwarranted, and automatic downgrade is allowed. 5. One-sentence report phrase ath11k fails to reset station accounting across repeated hardware restarts, eventually rejecting new peers without demonstrated memory corruption or attacker-controlled restart reachability. 6. Manual review advice NO MANUAL CHECK NEEDED The patch and logs support only constrained WiFi service degradation. 7. Call-site confidence Call-site confidence: high ====================================================================== UPSTREAM PATCH SUMMARY ====================================================================== Patch: wifi: ath11k: reset ar->num_stations on hardware start [ Upstream Commit: 60142eb2afda34508e640a3ff2a54c90e51525cc Upstream URL: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/commit/?id=60142eb2afda34508e640a3ff2a54c90e51525cc Changed files: net/mac80211/util.c drivers/net/wireless/ath/ath11k/mac.c Diff excerpt: Not included in this email. See the upstream URL for the full patch. Full patch: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git/commit/?id=60142eb2afda34508e640a3ff2a54c90e51525cc ====================================================================== DETAILED REPORT METHODOLOGY ====================================================================== The original Linux kernel CVE announcement for CVE-2026-98936 can be found here: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-cve-announce/?q=CVE-2026-98936 The original CVE announcement normally does not include a security-level estimate. In particular, it may not contain a CVSS assessment, an impact level, or enough information to determine whether the reported bug is a practically relevant security issue. One purpose of this parallel CVE list is to provide that missing technical and prioritization information. The original goal of the AL-KERNEL project was to prioritize Linux kernel CVE analysis automatically before manual review. The system can also help identify non-security issues that may be suitable for automatic closure. This report was generated by AL-KERNEL, an AI-assisted Linux kernel vulnerability analysis system developed by Alexander Larkin. The first analysis stage combines an autonomous classifier with additional LLM-based analysis. The autonomous classifier runs locally on a CPU and is based on a backpropagation neural network. Together, these mechanisms produce a technical vulnerability description, identify likely weakness types, estimate CVSS severity, and provide input for ActionableScore. Two CVSS estimates are retained because incomplete kernel vulnerability information often permits more than one defensible interpretation: Conservative CVSS vector: AV:L/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L The Best / paranoid CVSS vector: AV:A/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H The Best / paranoid CVSS score: 5.3 The conservative vector represents a lower-impact interpretation. The Best/paranoid vector intentionally represents a plausible upper-bound interpretation and should not automatically be treated as demonstrated real-world impact. CVSS may also need to be adjusted for a particular Linux deployment, because actual reachability, privileges, enabled kernel configuration, hardware, namespaces, exposed device nodes, and other environmental conditions can differ significantly between systems. A separate ActionableScore mechanism evaluates practical remediation urgency. Its analysis may include reachability, attack prerequisites, subsystem exposure, memory-corruption characteristics, denial-of-service reliability, and possible confidentiality, integrity, or privilege-escalation impact. Conservative ActionableScore: unknown Paranoid ActionableScore: 1 The final base severity is taken directly from the second tab-separated field of the AL-KERNEL classification result. ActionableScore does not replace or independently override that final AL-KERNEL decision, and if ActionableScore adjusted impact level of ALKERNEL, then you would see self-readable flags above like INCREASED_TO_HIGH_BASED_ON_ACTIONABLESCOREHIGHEREQTHAN7. For an AL-KERNEL result of MODERATE, this report uses the following additional presentation split: ActionableScore below 5 -> MODERATE REGULAR ActionableScore 5 or more -> MODERATE 7.0 The distinction between MODERATE REGULAR and MODERATE 7.0 makes it possible to identify Moderate issues that should receive manual analysis and fixes before lower-priority MODERATE REGULAR issues. In many cases, MODERATE REGULAR fixes may wait for a later rebase or routine update. There is one override in which MODERATE REGULAR becomes MODERATE 7.0 even when the ActionableScore is below 5. When the AL-KERNEL result contains the KPANIC flag, a MODERATE result is always presented as MODERATE 7.0. The KPANIC flag selected with few regexps without usage of AI at all, so it helps to detect cases when Kernel Crash happens and similar (to filter False-Negative results from the LLM usage). KPANIC indicates that a reliable kernel crash, kernel panic, or similarly serious kernel availability impact was identified by the classification workflow. AL-KERNEL base severity for this report: LOW KPANIC detected for this report: NO Published priority for this report (same as in Subject): LOW These results are intended to support engineering triage. They are machine-generated estimates, and cases marked for manual review should be validated by a human security engineer before final disposition. For more info read docs linked from here: https://kernelcve.org/ (and you can submit you own patch there to generate such a report for non-existant CVE-id yet). Note that in many cases this AI tool selects higher severity, than real is (means you can expect Importants instead of Moderate 7.0 or Moderates 7.0 instead of regular Moderates). If you see such cases, please use reply email interface to add additional manual analyses info to this particular CVE. And please, please, let me know when you see Lows instead of Importants or Important instead of Low (because particular for such cases I need to tune this AI tool to make it better for this one and next similar). My contact email for such notifications is alexanjelausa@gmail.com (and both send reply to CVE record itself too and see "reply" button below for howto reply).