#VU39087 NULL pointer dereference in Binutils - CVE-2017-8395

Vulnerability identifier: #VU39087

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-2017-8395

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 write of size 8 because of missing a malloc() return-value check to see if memory had actually been allocated in the _bfd_generic_get_section_contents function. This vulnerability causes programs that conduct an analysis of binary programs using the libbfd library, such as objcopy, 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=21431

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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.