Linux 7.2.4, 6.18.50, 6.12.109: SMACK had a use-after-free
Published by RodHat
Greg Kroah-Hartman put out Linux 7.2.4, 6.18.50, and 6.12.109 on September 7. About 1,650 commits across the current stable and two longterm branches. Standard weekly maintenance. Where the use-after-free fixes landed is the interesting part: MediaTek’s mt76 Wi-Fi 7 driver took heavy hits, and so did SMACK.
SMACK is the Simplified Mandatory Access Control Kernel, a Linux Security Module that does MAC enforcement at the kernel level. It is, in other words, a thing whose entire job is making the kernel more secure. It had use-after-free bugs. You can be surprised by this or you can file it under “C gives you memory management by hand and sometimes that goes wrong” and move on. If you have been tracking the Rust-in-kernel push over the last few years, this is another data point for that folder. Nobody is going to be shocked.
The mt76 UAFs are in the Multi-Link Operation paths. MLO is the Wi-Fi 7 feature that lets a client hold simultaneous associations across 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz bands under one logical connection. It is complicated state management. Complicated state management in a C driver produces this kind of cleanup. The fixes are that: cleanup, not a rethink of the approach.
Distro patch wave
SUSE cleared 86 CVEs across 12 advisories in roughly the same window. Ubuntu shipped over 100 kernel vulnerability patches. If you are on a distro kernel and the last update was more than two weeks ago, the answer to “am I behind” is yes.
Rocky Linux users have a separate line item: CVE-2026-53264, a Traffic Control subsystem UAF that dropped earlier in September. It is in these trees. The CIQ Knowledge Base has mitigation notes if you need documented steps to paste into an incident ticket.
Update procedure
Same as always. If you are on a distro, use your package manager. If you are running a vanilla stable kernel, pull from kernel.org, rebuild, reboot. There is no clever workaround for a UAF in a security module. You update it.
The Linux LTS and AI commit credits story from a few days ago is unrelated but if you are thinking about how the kernel development process is changing, they are happening at the same time.
FreeBSD Summit, same day
The FreeBSD Developer Summit opened this morning in Brussels as part of EuroBSDCon 2026, running today and tomorrow. Conference talks are Saturday and Sunday. If you are there, you already know this. If you are not, FreeBSD 14.5-RELEASE shipped yesterday and that is a reasonable way to spend the time instead.