CVE-2020-16599 — A Null Pointer Dereference vulnerability exists in the Binary File Descriptor (B

A Null Pointer Dereference vulnerability exists in the Binary File Descriptor (BFD) library (aka libbfd), as distributed in GNU Binutils 2.35, in _bfd_elf_get_symbol_version_string, as demonstrated in nm-new, that can cause a denial of service via a crafted file.

01What is this vulnerability?

A Null Pointer Dereference vulnerability exists in the Binary File Descriptor (BFD) library (aka libbfd), as distributed in GNU Binutils 2.35, in _bfd_elf_get_symbol_version_string, as demonstrated in nm-new, that can cause a denial of service via a crafted file.

02Affected products

Vendor	Product	Versions
n	a / n/a	n/a

03Active exploitation status

Not currently listed on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. EPSS is the best forward-looking signal — see the EPSS row above.

04Recommended remediation

• Patch to a fixed version listed in the vendor advisory (see references below).
• Mitigate with WAF rules, network egress filters, or feature flags where the patch is not yet available.
• Hunt historical logs for exploitation indicators — see Detection signatures below.

05Technical details

For the full vendor write-up, exploit chains, and reference implementations, see the references list in section 09.

06Detection signatures

Ask SARA in chat to draft a starting detection for this CVE in your stack of choice.

07Related CVEs

No directly-cited follow-up CVEs in the KB record for this advisory. The references list in section 09 carries the vendor cross-references.

08Timeline

• Published: 2020-12-09T21:06:35.000Z
• Last modified: 2024-08-04T13:45:33.134Z

09References

• sourceware.org — https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=25842
• sourceware.org — https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git%3Bh=8d55d10ac0d112c586e…
• security.netapp.com — https://security.netapp.com/advisory/ntap-20210122-0003/