debian · CVE-2023-53641

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Priority: not yet assigned Published: Updated: Wed, 15 Jul 2026 01:44:39 GMT

View at Official debian advisory, NVD, CVE.org · CVE detail

Freshness: upstream tracker timestamp is available; use API updated time as primary recency signal.

Tracker summary

CVE-2023-53641 not yet assigned priority: Debian including 1 source packages (linux), 5 status rows across 5 suites (bookworm, bullseye, forky, sid, trixie): resolved 5.

Description:

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: wifi: ath9k: hif_usb: fix memory leak of remain_skbs hif_dev->remain_skb is allocated and used exclusively in ath9k_hif_usb_rx_stream(). It is implied that an allocated remain_skb is processed and subsequently freed (in error paths) only during the next call of ath9k_hif_usb_rx_stream(). So, if the urbs are deallocated between those two calls due to the device deinitialization or suspend, it is possible that ath9k_hif_usb_rx_stream() is not called next time and the allocated remain_skb is leaked. Our local Syzkaller instance was able to trigger that. remain_skb makes sense when receiving two consecutive urbs which are logically linked together, i.e. a specific data field from the first skb indicates a cached skb to be allocated, memcpy'd with some data and subsequently processed in the next call to ath9k_hif_usb_rx_stream(). Urbs deallocation supposedly makes that link irrelevant so we need to free the cached skb in those cases. Fix the leak by introducing a function to explicitly free remain_skb (if it is not NULL) when the rx urbs have been deallocated. remain_skb is NULL when it has not been allocated at all (hif_dev struct is kzalloced) or when it has been processed in next call to ath9k_hif_usb_rx_stream(). Found by Linux Verification Center (linuxtesting.org) with Syzkaller.

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