CVE-2021-45078

An out-of-bounds flaw was found in binutils’ stabs functionality. The attack needs to be initiated locally where an attacker could convince a victim to read a specially crafted file that is processed by objdump, leading to the disclosure of memory and possibly leading to the execution of arbitrary code or causing the utility to crash.

The issue is classified as moderate severity primarily because binutils is not typically exposed to untrusted inputs in most environments, limiting its exploitation potential. Moreover, binutils does not handle privileged operations, meaning exploitation is unlikely to lead to system compromise or escalation of privileges. Additionally, the impact is localized to the application itself, without affecting the broader system or network security.

As per upstream binutils security policy this issue is not considered as a security flaw. Basically the key element of the policy that affects this is the understanding that analysis of untrusted binaries must always be done in a sandbox because the ELF format is open ended enough to make the analysis tools do anything, like including and processing arbitrary files. This eliminates the only possible vulnerability vector here, which is the possibility of a user being tricked into downloading and analyzing an untrusted ELF without sandboxing.

See the binutils security policy for more details: https://sourceware.org/cgit/binutils-gdb/tree/binutils/SECURITY.txt

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.

Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options do not meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base or stability.