Re: [PATCH] wifi: cfg80211: don't allow negative key_len values

[Dan Carpenter]

On Thu, Apr 30, 2026 at 09:05:35AM +0200, Johannes Berg wrote:
> On Thu, 2026-04-30 at 09:15 +0300, Dan Carpenter wrote:
> > The ath6kl_cfg80211_add_key() function has an upper bounds check on
> > params->key_len which ensures that it can't go over WLAN_MAX_KEY_LEN but
> > it doesn't check for negatives.  This could potentially lead to memory
> > corruption.
> > 
> > Put a bounds check on negative values in cfg80211_validate_key_settings()
> > to prevent this sort of bug in the future.
> 
> Clearly this commit doesn't seem problematic, but I'm not sure I see the
> path to it mattering? The key_len should only ever be set by
> wext/nl80211, and that can't really end up with a negative length?
> 
> We should probably just make it a u8 there, no way it's ever bigger than
> that, but I'm not seeing through why this would matter much right now.

Ah.  Yeah.  You're right.  :/  Sorry for the noise.

regards,
dan carpenter