CVE-2025-69651

medium

Description

GNU Binutils thru 2.46 readelf contains a vulnerability that leads to an invalid pointer free when processing a crafted ELF binary with malformed relocation or symbol data. If dump_relocations returns early due to parsing errors, the internal all_relocations array may remain partially uninitialized. Later, process_got_section_contents() may attempt to free an invalid r_symbol pointer, triggering memory corruption checks in glibc and causing the program to terminate with SIGABRT. No evidence of further memory corruption or code execution was observed; the impact is limited to denial of service. NOTE: this is disputed by third parties because the observed behavior occurred only in pre-release code and did not affect any tagged version.

References

https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git;h=ea4bc025abdba85a90e26e13f551c16a44bfa921

https://sourceware.org/git/?p=binutils-gdb.git;a=commitdiff;h=ea4bc025abdba85a90e26e13f551c16a44bfa92

https://sourceware.org/git/?p=binutils-gdb.git;a=commitdiff;h=81e90cf63a10ad11772c2437c8f2a88f1a00c739

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=33700

https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=33698

Details

Source: Mitre, NVD

Published: 2026-03-06

Updated: 2026-03-19

Risk Information

CVSS v2

Base Score: 4.9

Vector: CVSS2#AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:N/I:N/A:C

Severity: Medium

CVSS v3

Base Score: 5.5

Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

Severity: Medium

EPSS

EPSS: 0.00022