CVE-2018-18606

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 2.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2018-10-23 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-476

Description

An issue was discovered in the merge_strings function in merge.c in the Binary File Descriptor (BFD) library (aka libbfd), as distributed in GNU Binutils 2.31. There is a NULL pointer dereference in _bfd_add_merge_section when attempting to merge sections with large alignments. A specially crafted ELF allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service, as demonstrated by ld.

Affected products

Debian Linux: 7.0, 8.0, 9.0
GNU Binutils: 2.31
NetApp Data ONTAP operating in 7-Mode: all versions

References

http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2019-10/msg00072.html
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2019-11/msg00008.html
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/105754
https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20190307-0003/
https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=23806
https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git%3Bh=45a0eaf77022963d639d6d19871dbab7b79703fc
https://usn.ubuntu.com/4336-1/
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2019-10/msg00072.html
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2019-11/msg00008.html
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/105754
https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20190307-0003/
https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=23806

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