Quick answers
- Is CVE-2026-90828 exploited in the wild?
- No. Junglewise Threat Intelligence has no report of CVE-2026-90828 being exploited in the wild.
- How severe is CVE-2026-90828?
- Medium severity, with a CVSS score of 5.3, published 14 September 2026.
- Which products and versions are affected?
- Gnu Binutils 2.47, earlier versions back to at least 2.41.
- Is there a fix for CVE-2026-90828?
- A patch was published on 2026-09-22: Fix committed to master branch for Binutils 2.48 by Alan Modra Junglewise finds every place you run it, drafts the upgrade and applies it once you approve.
- How is CVE-2026-90828 attacked?
- It is attacked with local access, in a software library.
- Am I affected by CVE-2026-90828?
- 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 elf_orphan_compatible() function in ld/ldelf.c (line 2092). It occurs during relocatable linking (-r flag) when processing malformed input sections that become orphans without a compatible output section. The function dereferences a NULL linked_to pointer without sanity-checking it first, assuming that the SHF_LINK_ORDER flag guarantees the pointer is valid. The attack is local and triggered by providing a crafted object file as input to the linker. An attacker can cause a segmentation fault and crash the linker process. The fix, committed by Alan Modra on 2026-09-22, adds a NULL pointer check before dereferencing the linked_to field.
Affected products
- GNU Binutils 2.47, earlier versions back to at least 2.41
Timeline
- 2026-07-28: disclosed: Reported to Sourceware Bugzilla as bug #34450
- 2026-09-14: advisory: CVE-2026-90828 published
- 2026-09-22: patched: Fix committed to master branch for Binutils 2.48 by Alan Modra