CVE-2026-98186
In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: wifi: mwifiex: bound the pairwise-cipher OUI walk to the IE length mwifiex_search_oui_in_ie() reads a pairwise-cipher (PTK) count from a beacon/probe-response RSN or WPA information element and then walks that many 4-byte OUIs, comparing each with memcmp(). The count comes straight from the (attacker-supplied) IE and is never checked against the element's own length, and the callers admit the element on element_id alone (has_ieee_hdr() / has_vendor_hdr(), no length check). A crafted RSN/WPA IE with a large pairwise count therefore makes the walk read up to 255 * 4 bytes past the element -- an out-of-bounds read of the kmemdup()'d beacon buffer, reachable from any AP whose beacon/probe response is processed during scan-result parsing. Pass the number of IE bytes available at the OUI list and bound the walk to the element. Keep the length signed and reject a negative value before any unsigned arithmetic, so a small or zero IE length cannot underflow to a large size_t and defeat the bound. Found by 0sec automated security-research tooling (https://0sec.ai).
Affected versions
Linux kernel versions
3.0
and later are affected. Fixed in
5.10.271,
5.15.222,
6.1.189,
6.6.158,
6.12.112,
6.18.54,
7.2.8,
7.3-rc4
and their respective stable series.
References
8 totalFrequently asked questions
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What is CVE-2026-98186?
CVE-2026-98186 is a unscored severity Linux kernel vulnerability . It affects Linux kernel versions from 3.0 onward and has been patched in 5.10.271, 5.15.222, 6.1.189 and others. CVE-2026-98186 has not been confirmed as actively exploited and is not listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
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Is there a patch available for CVE-2026-98186?
Yes. CVE-2026-98186 has been patched. Fixed versions include 5.10.271, 5.15.222, 6.1.189 and others. If you are running Linux kernel 3.0 or later up to the fix versions, apply the relevant patch for your kernel branch.
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Is CVE-2026-98186 actively exploited?
No. CVE-2026-98186 has not been confirmed as actively exploited. It is not listed in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog.