Executive brief
A memory leak vulnerability was identified in the Linux kernel's wilc1000 Wi-Fi driver, which is used to support certain Microchip wireless chips. When the driver fails to initialize the hardware bus during a firmware download, it fails to release previously allocated memory. Over time, repeated failures could lead to memory exhaustion, potentially causing system instability or a denial-of-service condition.
Technical details
A memory leak exists in the wilc_wlan_firmware_download() function within the wilc1000 driver (drivers/net/wireless/microchip/wilc1000/wlan.c). The function allocates a DMA buffer using kmalloc() but contains an early error return path following an acquire_bus() failure that bypasses the kfree() cleanup label. An attacker or a series of hardware failures could trigger this path to exhaust kernel memory. The issue has been resolved by replacing the direct return with a goto statement to ensure proper memory deallocation. Patches are available in various stable kernel branches including 6.18.34 and 7.0.11.
Affected products
- Linux Linux Kernel 6.13, 6.18.34, 7.0.11
Timeline
- 2026-07-19: disclosed
- 2026-07-19: advisory