CVE-2018-20651

Severity: medium (CVSS 5.5 v3.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 2.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2019-01-01 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-476

Description

A NULL pointer dereference was discovered in elf_link_add_object_symbols in elflink.c in the Binary File Descriptor (BFD) library (aka libbfd), as distributed in GNU Binutils 2.31.1. This occurs for a crafted ET_DYN with no program headers. A specially crafted ELF file allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service, as demonstrated by ld.

Affected products

GNU Binutils: 2.31.1

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/106440
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201908-01
https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=24041
https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git%3Bh=54025d5812ff100f5f0654eb7e1ffd50f2e37f5f
https://support.f5.com/csp/article/K38336243
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/106440
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201908-01

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