In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved: iwlwifi: fix use-after-free If no firmware was present at all (or, presumably, all of the firmware files failed to parse), we end up unbinding by calling device_release_driver(), which calls remove(), which then in iwlwifi calls iwl_drv_stop(), freeing the 'drv' struct. However the new code I added will still erroneously access it after it was freed. Set 'failure=false' in this case to avoid the access, all data was already freed anyway.
The product reuses or references memory after it has been freed. At some point afterward, the memory may be allocated again and saved in another pointer, while the original pointer references a location somewhere within the new allocation. Any operations using the original pointer are no longer valid because the memory "belongs" to the code that operates on the new pointer.