#VU38377 Out-of-bounds read in Binutils - CVE-2017-13757

Vulnerability identifier: #VU38377

Vulnerability risk: Medium

CVSSv4.0: 4 [CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:A/VC:N/VI:N/VA:H/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N/E:U/U:Green]

CVE-ID: CVE-2017-13757

CWE-ID: CWE-125

Exploitation vector: Local

Exploit availability: No

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

Vendor: GNU

Description

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

The vulnerability exists due to a boundary error in The Binary File Descriptor (BFD) library (aka libbfd), as distributed in GNU Binutils 2.29, does not validate the PLT section size, which. A remote attacker can perform a denial of service (heap-based buffer over-read and application crash) via a crafted ELF file, related to elf_i386_get_synthetic_symtab in elf32-i386.c and elf_x86_64_get_synthetic_symtab in elf64-x86-64.c.

Mitigation
Install update from vendor's website.

Vulnerable software versions

Binutils: 2.29

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External links
https://www.securityfocus.com/bid/100532
https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=22018
https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git;h=90efb6422939ca031804266fba669f77c22a274a

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Q & A

Can this vulnerability be exploited remotely?

No. This vulnerability can be exploited locally. The attacker should have authentication credentials and successfully authenticate on the system.

Is there known malware, which exploits this vulnerability?

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