#VU39084 NULL pointer dereference in Binutils - CVE-2017-8392

Vulnerability identifier: #VU39084

Vulnerability risk: Medium

CVSSv4.0: 6.6 [CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:U/U:Green]

CVE-ID: CVE-2017-8392

CWE-ID: CWE-476

Exploitation vector: Network

Exploit availability: No

Vulnerable software:
Binutils
Universal components / Libraries / Libraries used by multiple products

Vendor: GNU

Description

The vulnerability allows a remote non-authenticated attacker to perform a denial of service (DoS) attack.

The Binary File Descriptor (BFD) library (aka libbfd), as distributed in GNU Binutils 2.28, is vulnerable to an invalid read of size 8 because of missing a check to determine whether symbols are NULL in the _bfd_dwarf2_find_nearest_line function. This vulnerability causes programs that conduct an analysis of binary programs using the libbfd library, such as objdump, to crash.

Mitigation
Install update from vendor's website.

Vulnerable software versions

Binutils: 2.28

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External links
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201709-02
https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=21409

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Q & A

Can this vulnerability be exploited remotely?

Yes. This vulnerability can be exploited by a remote non-authenticated attacker via the Internet.

Is there known malware, which exploits this vulnerability?

No. We are not aware of malware exploiting this vulnerability.