CVE-2022-4285 — An illegal memory access flaw was found in the binutils package

An illegal memory access flaw was found in the binutils package. Parsing an ELF file containing corrupt symbol version information may result in a denial of service. This issue is the result of an incomplete fix for CVE-2020-16599.

01What is this vulnerability?

An illegal memory access flaw was found in the binutils package. Parsing an ELF file containing corrupt symbol version information may result in a denial of service. This issue is the result of an incomplete fix for CVE-2020-16599.

02Affected products

Vendor	Product	Versions
n	a / binutils	binutils 2.39-7

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

08Timeline

• Published: 2023-01-27T00:00:00.000Z
• Last modified: 2025-03-28T15:41:27.970Z

09References

• sourceware.org — https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=29699
• bugzilla.redhat.com — https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2150768
• sourceware.org — https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git%3Bh=5c831a3c7f3ca98d6ab…
• security.gentoo.org — https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202309-15