CVE-2026-98824

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

wifi: mac80211: validate TX status rate metadata

minstrel ht tx status() converts the HT/VHT rate reported in a TX status into a group and rate index and uses those to index the minstrel ht rate tables. The existing validation only checked that an entry was present and had tries recorded; it did not check that the reported MCS, spatial stream count and bandwidth are representable by the tables, so malformed metadata passed to minstrel ht get stats() or minstrel ht ri get stats() could be used as an out-of-bounds index.

Validate the rate metadata in the common TX status path instead of only in minstrel ht, since the values are used by more than rate control. The legacy ieee80211 tx rate array and the rate info based entries are sanitized in ieee80211 tx status ext() and ieee80211 tx rate update() before any consumer runs: an entry that does not describe a valid rate for its encoding is dropped. minstrel ht keeps the checks that depend on its own tables, i.e. the supported number of spatial streams, the MCS group size and the supported bandwidths.

This does not take away the driver's responsibility to report sane values, it only prevents a single bad report from corrupting mac80211 state. No WARN ON() is added: with panic on warn a driver bug would otherwise turn into a denial of service.