Executive brief
A vulnerability was found in the readelf utility, a tool used by developers and administrators to examine the internal structure of executable files. By tricking a user into opening a specially crafted file, an attacker can cause the tool to crash or consume all available system memory. This results in a denial of service, potentially disrupting development workflows or automated system analysis tasks.
Technical details
The readelf utility in binutils version 2.46 contains two distinct Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerabilities. The first is a resource exhaustion issue (CWE-400) where a crafted ELF file triggers an excessive memory allocation (reportedly up to 6.3TB), leading to an Out-of-Memory (OOM) termination. The second is a null pointer dereference (CWE-476) caused by malformed section header entry sizes (sh_entsize) or offsets (shoff), resulting in a segmentation fault (SIGSEGV). Exploitation requires a local user to run readelf against a malicious ELF file. At the time of the advisory, these issues were identified via fuzzing and affect multiple Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions.
Affected products
- GNU binutils 2.46
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0
- Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.0
Timeline
- 2026-04-21: other: Reported to Red Hat Bugzilla
- 2026-04-22: disclosed: CVE published
- 2026-05-20: advisory: NVD analysis updated