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HIGH

binutils: heap-based buffer overflow in function _bfd_archive_64_bit_slurp_armap in archive64.c

Published Feb 24, 2019

Description

An issue was discovered in the Binary File Descriptor (BFD) library (aka libbfd), as distributed in GNU Binutils 2.32. It is a heap-based buffer overflow in _bfd_archive_64_bit_slurp_armap in archive64.c.

Affected products

Remediation

Red Hat statement

The issue is classified as moderate severity primarily because binutils is not typically exposed to untrusted inputs in most environments, limiting its exploitation potential. Moreover, binutils does not handle privileged operations, meaning exploitation is unlikely to lead to system compromise or escalation of privileges. Additionally, the impact is localized to the application itself, without affecting the broader system or network security. As per upstream binutils security policy this issue is not considered as a security flaw. Basically the key element of the policy that affects this is the understanding that analysis of untrusted binaries must always be done in a sandbox because the ELF format is open ended enough to make the analysis tools do anything, like including and processing arbitrary files. This eliminates the only possible vulnerability vector here, which is the possibility of a user being tricked into downloading and analyzing an untrusted ELF without sandboxing. See the binutils security policy for more details: https://sourceware.org/cgit/binutils-gdb/tree/binutils/SECURITY.txt

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Sources
CVE.org / MITRE
Status PUBLISHED
Assigner mitre
Published Feb 24, 2019
Updated Aug 4, 2024
Reserved Feb 23, 2019
NVD
Status Modified
Modified Jun 17, 2026
Red Hat
Severity Moderate
Public date Feb 19, 2019