CVE-2025-37743

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

wifi: ath12k: Avoid memory leak while enabling statistics

Driver uses monitor destination rings for extended statistics mode and standalone monitor mode. In extended statistics mode, TLVs are parsed from the buffer received from the monitor destination ring and assigned to the ppdu_info structure to update per-packet statistics. In standalone monitor mode, along with per-packet statistics, the packet data (payload) is captured, and the driver updates per MSDU to mac80211.

When the AP interface is enabled, only extended statistics mode is activated. As part of enabling monitor rings for collecting statistics, the driver subscribes to HAL_RX_MPDU_START TLV in the filter configuration. This TLV is received from the monitor destination ring, and kzalloc for the mon_mpdu object occurs, which is not freed, leading to a memory leak. The kzalloc for the mon_mpdu object is only required while enabling the standalone monitor interface. This causes a memory leak while enabling extended statistics mode in the driver.

Fix this memory leak by removing the kzalloc for the mon_mpdu object in the HAL_RX_MPDU_START TLV handling. Additionally, remove the standalone monitor mode handlings in the HAL_MON_BUF_ADDR and HAL_RX_MSDU_END TLVs. These TLV tags will be handled properly when enabling standalone monitor mode in the future.

Tested-on: QCN9274 hw2.0 PCI WLAN.WBE.1.3.1-00173-QCAHKSWPL_SILICONZ-1 Tested-on: WCN7850 hw2.0 PCI WLAN.HMT.1.0.c5-00481-QCAHMTSWPL_V1.0_V2.0_SILICONZ-3

Weakness

The product does not sufficiently track and release allocated memory after it has been used, making the memory unavailable for reallocation and reuse.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Choose a language or tool that provides automatic memory management, or makes manual memory management less error-prone.
• For example, glibc in Linux provides protection against free of invalid pointers.
• When using Xcode to target OS X or iOS, enable automatic reference counting (ARC) [REF-391].
• To help correctly and consistently manage memory when programming in C++, consider using a smart pointer class such as std::auto_ptr (defined by ISO/IEC ISO/IEC 14882:2003), std::shared_ptr and std::unique_ptr (specified by an upcoming revision of the C++ standard, informally referred to as C++ 1x), or equivalent solutions such as Boost.

References

• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/286bab0fc7b9db728dab8c63cadf6be9b3facf8c
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/ecfc131389923405be8e7a6f4408fd9321e4d19b