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Fencer Vulns
medium 5.5

CVE-2025-38509 json

wifi: mac80211: reject VHT opmode for unsupported channel widths

published 2025-08-16 14 mo ago modified 2026-11-05 3 d ago also EUVD-2025-25089

cvss
5.5
version 3.1, NVD
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:

wifi: mac80211: reject VHT opmode for unsupported channel widths

VHT operating mode notifications are not defined for channel widths below 20 MHz. In particular, 5 MHz and 10 MHz are not valid under the VHT specification and must be rejected.

Without this check, malformed notifications using these widths may reach ieee80211_chan_width_to_rx_bw(), leading to a WARN_ON due to invalid input. This issue was reported by syzbot.

Reject these unsupported widths early in sta_link_apply_parameters() when opmode_notif is used. The accepted set includes 20, 40, 80, 160, and 80+80 MHz, which are valid for VHT. While 320 MHz is not defined for VHT, it is allowed to avoid rejecting HE or EHT clients that may still send a VHT opmode notification.

Patch / fix

  • Linux Linux 6.15.7, 6.16
  • linux-aws-6.14 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.14.0-1017.17~24.04.1
  • linux-gcp-6.14 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.14.0-1020.21~24.04.1
  • linux-oem-6.14 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.14.0-1016.16
  • linux-azure-6.14 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.14.0-1017.17~24.04.1
  • linux-riscv-6.14 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.14.0-36.36.1~24.04.1
  • linux-oracle-6.14 Ubuntu 24.04 LTS 6.14.0-1017.17~24.04.1
  • linux-realtime-6.14 Ubuntu Pro Realtime 24.04 LTS 6.14.0-1016.16~24.04.1

ubuntu advisories UBUNTU-CVE-2025-38509

Ubuntu security data © Canonical Ltd., from https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-security-notices via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

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-2025-38509 updated cvss 4.7

kernel: wifi: mac80211: reject VHT opmode for unsupported channel widths

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 perf, kernel, python-perf, kernel-kdump, kernel-firmware, kernel-bootwrapper, +1 more
    affected: no fix planned “Out of support scope”
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 rv, perf, rtla, kernel, bpftool, libperf, +83 more Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 kernel
    affected: no fix available “Fix deferred”
  • 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
    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
3 d ago

Exploit prediction

0.14% 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
NVD 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

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.