CVE-2017-14974

Publication date 2 October 2017

Last updated 25 August 2025

Ubuntu priority

Cvss 3 Severity Score

Description

The *_get_synthetic_symtab functions in the Binary File Descriptor (BFD) library (aka libbfd), as distributed in GNU Binutils 2.29, mishandle the failure of a certain canonicalization step, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (NULL pointer dereference and application crash) via a crafted ELF file, related to elf32-i386.c and elf64-x86-64.c.

Status

Show unmaintained releases

Package	Ubuntu Release	Status
binutils	19.10 eoan	Not affected
	19.04 disco	Not affected
	18.10 cosmic	Not affected
	18.04 LTS bionic	Not affected
	17.10 artful	Not affected
	17.04 zesty	Ignored end of life
	16.04 LTS xenial	Not affected
	14.04 LTS trusty	Not affected

Patch details

For informational purposes only. We recommend not to cherry-pick updates. How can I get the fixes?

Package	Patch details
binutils	Upstream: https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git;h=e70c19e3a4c26e9c1ebf0c9170d105039b56d7cf

Severity score breakdown

CVSS version: CVSS v3.0

Base score 5.5 · Medium

Base metrics

Parameter	Value
Attack vector	Local
Attack complexity	Low
Privileges required	None
User interaction	Required
Scope	Unchanged
Confidentiality impact	None
Integrity impact	None
Availability impact	High

Scores

Parameter	Value
Base score	5.5 · Medium
Exploitability score	-
Impact score	-

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

References

Other references

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2017-14974