What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-20197

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.3 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2021-03-26 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-59

Description

There is an open race window when writing output in the following utilities in GNU binutils version 2.35 and earlier:ar, objcopy, strip, ranlib. When these utilities are run as a privileged user (presumably as part of a script updating binaries across different users), an unprivileged user can trick these utilities into getting ownership of arbitrary files through a symlink.

Affected products

• Broadcom Brocade Fabric Operating System Firmware: all versions
• GNU Binutils: through 2.35
• NetApp Cloud Backup: all versions
• NetApp ONTAP Select Deploy administration utility: all versions
• NetApp Solidfire & Hci Management Node: all versions
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 8.0

References

• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1913743
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202208-30
• https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20210528-0009/
• https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=26945
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1913743
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202208-30
• https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20210528-0009/
• https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=26945

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