Binutils, elfutils: Buffer overflow

Background

The GNU Binutils are a collection of tools to create, modify and analyse binary files. Many of the files use BFD, the Binary File Descriptor library, to do low-level manipulation. Elfutils provides a library and utilities to access, modify and analyse ELF objects.

Description

Tavis Ormandy and Ned Ludd of the Gentoo Linux Security Audit Team discovered an integer overflow in the BFD library and elfutils, resulting in a heap based buffer overflow.

Impact

Successful exploitation would require a user to access a specially crafted binary file, resulting in the execution of arbitrary code.

Workaround

There is no known workaround at this time.

Resolution

All GNU Binutils users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose sys-devel/binutils

All elfutils users should upgrade to the latest version:

 # emerge --sync
 # emerge --ask --oneshot --verbose ">=dev-libs/elfutils-0.108"