Quick answers
- Is CVE-2026-90802 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2026-90802 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-2026-90802?
- Medium severity, with a CVSS score of 4.4, published 14 September 2026.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- Gnu Binutils 2.47.
- Is there a fix for CVE-2026-90802?
- No fixed version is recorded yet. Check the vendor's advisory in the references below. If you run it, Junglewise drafts a mitigation that fits your setup and applies it once you approve, with senior security engineers behind it.
- How is CVE-2026-90802 attacked?
- It is attacked with local access, in a software library.
- Am I affected by CVE-2026-90802?
- Check whether you run Gnu Binutils at an affected version. Junglewise does that check for you around the clock: connect your code, cloud and domains, and it matches new vulnerabilities like this one against what you actually run and tells you when one reaches you.
Technical details
The vulnerability is a null pointer dereference in the bfd_putl64 function (bfd/libbfd.c:989) triggered when processing a malformed ELF relocation. The attack chain originates in elf_x86_64_relocate_section, which calls bfd_elf64_swap_reloca_out, eventually reaching bfd_putl64 with an underflowed or null output buffer pointer. When the linker processes a crafted ELF object with options like --gc-sections --no-print-gc-sections -w, the malformed relocation causes a write to a null-derived address, triggering a segmentation fault. The vulnerability requires local access and the ability to provide a malicious object file to the linker. A proof-of-concept has been publicly disclosed, and the issue remains unpatched; a previous fix for a related crash at the same location (bug 33456) appears incomplete.
Affected products
- GNU Binutils 2.47
Timeline
- 2026-07-28: disclosed: Bug reported to Sourceware Bugzilla
- 2026-08-09: exploited: Public PoC released by r1ck9
- 2026-09-14: advisory: Published as CVE-2026-90802