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Unrated severityNVD Advisory· Published Oct 23, 2018· Updated Aug 5, 2024

CVE-2018-18606

CVE-2018-18606

Description

A NULL pointer dereference in the BFD library of GNU Binutils 2.31 allows denial of service via a crafted ELF file.

AI Insight

LLM-synthesized narrative grounded in this CVE's description and references.

A NULL pointer dereference in the BFD library of GNU Binutils 2.31 allows denial of service via a crafted ELF file.

Vulnerability

A NULL pointer dereference vulnerability exists in the merge_strings function in merge.c of the Binary File Descriptor (BFD) library (libbfd) as distributed in GNU Binutils 2.31. The issue occurs in _bfd_add_merge_section when attempting to merge sections with large alignments. A specially crafted ELF file triggers the flaw, leading to a crash.

Exploitation

An attacker can exploit this vulnerability by providing a crafted ELF file to a user or automated system that processes it using GNU Binutils tools (e.g., ld). No authentication or special privileges are required; the attack relies on social engineering or automated processing.

Impact

Successful exploitation causes a denial of service (crash) of the affected binary utility. While the official description focuses on denial of service, a related advisory [1] notes that other binutils vulnerabilities could lead to arbitrary code execution, but for this specific CVE, the impact is limited to a crash.

Mitigation

Ubuntu published a security update [1] that addresses this issue, upgrading binutils to version 2.30-21ubuntu1~18.04.3 for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Users should apply this update or upgrade to a patched version of GNU Binutils that includes the fix. As of the publication date, no upstream release explicitly mentions this CVE, but later versions likely contain the fix.

References
  1. USN-4336-1: GNU binutils vulnerabilities | Ubuntu security notices | Ubuntu

AI Insight generated on May 26, 2026. Synthesized from this CVE's description and the cited reference URLs; citations are validated against the source bundle.

Affected products

55

Patches

0

No patches discovered yet.

Vulnerability mechanics

No source-code context for this CVE — mechanics is only generated when we can read the actual fix diff. Without that, the four sections (root cause, attack vector, affected code, fix) would be speculation rather than analysis.

References

6

News mentions

0

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