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NULL Pointer Dereference

CVE-2018-18606

Medium
5.5/10

Summary

An issue was discovered in the merge_strings function in merge.c in the Binary File Descriptor (BFD) library (aka libbfd), as distributed in GNU Binutils 2.31. There is a NULL pointer dereference in _bfd_add_merge_section when attempting to merge sections with large alignments. A specially crafted ELF allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service, as demonstrated by ld.

  • LOW
  • LOCAL
  • NONE
  • UNCHANGED
  • REQUIRED
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • HIGH

CWE-476 - NULL Pointer Dereference

A NULL pointer dereference occurs when the application dereferences a pointer that it expects to be valid, but is NULL, typically causing a crash or exit.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published