Technical impact
A use‑after‑free flaw in Apple’s wireless stack has been mitigated with improved memory handling. The vulnerability remains exploitable by sending specially crafted Wi‑Fi packets, which can cause an application to crash or become unresponsive when a reference to a freed memory object is accessed. The impact is a denial‑of‑service that can be triggered by an attacker who can observe or transmit packets on the same network channel.
Affected Systems
Apple devices running iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, or watchOS are affected. The flaw is present in all versions prior to iOS 18.7.9, iPadOS 18.7.9, iOS 26.5, iPadOS 26.5, macOS Sequoia 15.7.7, macOS Sonoma 14.8.7, macOS Tahoe 26.5, tvOS 26.5, and watchOS 26.5.
Risk and Exploitability
The EPSS score < 1%, and the vulnerability is not listed in the CISA KEV catalog, so public exploitation data is limited. Nonetheless, the requirement for a privileged network position and the use‑after‑free nature of the bug suggest that a local or network attacker who can send crafted frames could reliably trigger a crash. The CVSS score is 5.3, but the inability to recover from the crash indicates a high‑severity threat once the flaw is exercised.
