In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: wifi: rtw88: usb: schedule rx work after everything is set up Right now it's possible to hit NULL pointer dereference in rtw_rx_fill_rx_status on hw object and/or its fields because initialization routine can start getting USB replies before rtw_dev is fully setup. The stack trace looks like this: rtw_rx_fill_rx_status rtw8821c_query_rx_desc rtw_usb_rx_handler ... queue_work rtw_usb_read_port_complete ... usb_submit_urb rtw_usb_rx_resubmit rtw_usb_init_rx rtw_usb_probe So while we do the async stuff rtw_usb_probe continues and calls rtw_register_hw, which does all kinds of initialization (e.g. via ieee80211_register_hw) that rtw_rx_fill_rx_status relies on. Fix this by moving the first usb_submit_urb after everything is set up. For me, this bug manifested as: [ 8.893177] rtw_8821cu 1-1:1.2: band wrong, packet dropped [ 8.910904] rtw_8821cu 1-1:1.2: hw->conf.chandef.chan NULL in rtw_rx_fill_rx_status because I'm using Larry's backport of rtw88 driver with the NULL checks in rtw_rx_fill_rx_status.