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Fencer Vulns
medium 5.5

CVE-2021-47225 json

mac80211: fix deadlock in AP/VLAN handling

published 2024-05-21 2 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2021-33873

cvss
5.5
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.1%
EPSS 0.1% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 3%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

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

mac80211: fix deadlock in AP/VLAN handling

Syzbot reports that when you have AP_VLAN interfaces that are up and close the AP interface they belong to, we get a deadlock. No surprise - since we dev_close() them with the wiphy mutex held, which goes back into the netdev notifier in cfg80211 and tries to acquire the wiphy mutex there.

To fix this, we need to do two things: 1) prevent changing iftype while AP_VLANs are up, we can't easily fix this case since cfg80211 already calls us with the wiphy mutex held, but change_interface() is relatively rare in drivers anyway, so changing iftype isn't used much (and userspace has to fall back to down/change/up anyway) 2) pull the dev_close() loop over VLANs out of the wiphy mutex section in the normal stop case

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 5.12.13, 5.13

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2021-47225 updated cvss 5.5

kernel: mac80211: fix deadlock in AP/VLAN handling

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, python-perf, kernel-kdump, +8 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 perf, kernel, bpftool, kernel-rt, kernel-core, kernel-tools, +29 more
    affected: workaround, no fix planned “Red Hat has investigated whether a possible mitigation exists for this issue, and has not been able to identify a practical example. Please update the affected package as soon as possible.”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 more
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

CISA SSVC

Exploitation
none
Automatable
no
Technical impact
partial
Assessed
2 y ago

Exploit prediction

0.15% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 3% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CISA ADP 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
CNA 3.1 5.5 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Affected products

  • Linux Linux

Classification

Weakness
Technology feeds

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.