The flaw resides in the Linux mac80211 Wi‑Fi subsystem where a packet’s receive status may be read after its memory has been either zeroed or freed during mesh forwarding. This use‑after‑free condition triggers a KASAN error and results in a kernel crash, causing a denial of service. No direct route for code execution is described in the official data, so the principal impact is system instability and service interruption.

All Linux kernel releases that contain the vulnerable mac80211 implementation and lack the patch found in the commit referenced by the kernel developers. The vulnerability exists in the core Linux kernel module, not tied to a specific distribution or version number.

The CVSS score of 8.8 classifies the issue as high severity. The EPSS score of less than 1% indicates a very low probability of exploitation observed to date, and the vulnerability is not listed in CISA’s KEV catalog. Attackers would need to send crafted mesh packets to a kernel running on a Wi‑Fi mesh node—an inferred local or network‑bounded vector—to trigger the crash.