CVE-2026-31604

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

wifi: rtw88: fix device leak on probe failure

Driver core holds a reference to the USB interface and its parent USB device while the interface is bound to a driver and there is no need to take additional references unless the structures are needed after disconnect.

This driver takes a reference to the USB device during probe but does not to release it on all probe errors (e.g. when descriptor parsing fails).

Drop the redundant device reference to fix the leak, reduce cargo culting, make it easier to spot drivers where an extra reference is needed, and reduce the risk of further memory leaks.

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/25a827b7e1d5747a255bdc757f1d3e9e1e8a4e2a
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/89a9c1bc7d797120bcc290864e0cb10a440a677f
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/a4f4371d194dfa5473cc961f86194084b1b13a69
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/af7307e96dad00bcc2675dac650d8558a52f2c6f
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/bbb15e71156cd9f5e1869eee7207a06ea8e96c39
• https://git.kernel.org/stable/c/f632987306bce9242cdfcf911ee0b2c9455e05a3