CVE-2020-35494

A flaw was found in binutils. An attacker who is able to submit a crafted input file to be processed by binutils could cause usage of uninitialized memory. The highest threat is to application availability with a lower threat to data confidentiality.

This issue is classified with a low severity primarily because binutils is not typically exposed to untrusted inputs in most environments, limiting the possibility of exploitation. Additionally, this segmentation fault due to uninitialized data in the heap is only triggered during the parsing of a specially crafted file, requiring an attacker to convince a user to process this file with binutils. Furthermore, binutils does not handle privileged operations, meaning that exploitation is unlikely to lead to system compromise or escalation of privileges. Also, the impact is limited to the application itself, without affecting the broader system or network security.

binutils as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8's GCC Toolset 10 and Red Hat Developer Toolset 10 are not affected by this flaw because the versions shipped have already received the patch.

The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.