CVE-2022-50179

Updated on 18 Jun 2025

Severity

7.8 High severity

Details

CVSS score
7.8
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Overview

About vulnerability

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

ath9k: fix use-after-free in ath9k_hif_usb_rx_cb

Syzbot reported use-after-free Read in ath9k_hif_usb_rx_cb() [0]. The problem was in incorrect htc_handle->drv_priv initialization.

Probable call trace which can trigger use-after-free:

ath9k_htc_probe_device() /* htc_handle->drv_priv = priv; */ ath9k_htc_wait_for_target() <— Failed ieee80211_free_hw() <— priv pointer is freed

... ath9k_hif_usb_rx_cb() ath9k_hif_usb_rx_stream() RX_STAT_INC() <--- htc_handle->drv_priv access

In order to not add fancy protection for drv_priv we can move htc_handle->drv_priv initialization at the end of the ath9k_htc_probe_device() and add helper macro to make all STAT macros NULL safe, since syzbot has reported related NULL deref in that macros [1]

Details

Affected packages:
linux-hwe @ 4.15.0 (+13 more)

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

ath9k: fix use-after-free in ath9k_hif_usb_rx_cb

Syzbot reported use-after-free Read in ath9k_hif_usb_rx_cb() [0]. The problem was in incorrect htc_handle->drv_priv initialization.

Probable call trace which can trigger use-after-free:

ath9k_htc_probe_device() /* htc_handle->drv_priv = priv; */ ath9k_htc_wait_for_target() <— Failed ieee80211_free_hw() <— priv pointer is freed

... ath9k_hif_usb_rx_cb() ath9k_hif_usb_rx_stream() RX_STAT_INC() <--- htc_handle->drv_priv access

In order to not add fancy protection for drv_priv we can move htc_handle->drv_priv initialization at the end of the ath9k_htc_probe_device() and add helper macro to make all STAT macros NULL safe, since syzbot has reported related NULL deref in that macros [1]

Fixes