CVE-2017-15996

high

Published 2017-10-29 · Modified 2026-05-13

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CVSS v3

7.8

CVSS:3.0/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

CVSS v4 NEW

—

not yet in upstream

VIR risk

7.8

Description

elfcomm.c in readelf in GNU Binutils 2.29 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (excessive memory allocation) or possibly have unspecified other impact via a crafted ELF file that triggers a "buffer overflow on fuzzed archive header," related to an uninitialized variable, an improper conditional jump, and the get_archive_member_name, process_archive_index_and_symbols, and setup_archive functions.

Predictions

Exploit likelihood

75%

Patch ETA

—

Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.

Mitigations

No mitigations published for this CVE yet.

The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.

✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here with source_tier=community-verified.

OS impact

SUSE Affected 1 release

Version	Status	Fixed in
—	Affected	—

Arch Fixed 1 release

Version	Status	Fixed in
—	Fixed	`2.30-1`

Debian Fixed 5 releases

Version	Status	Fixed in
trixie	Fixed	`2.29.90.20180122-1`
sid	Fixed	`2.29.90.20180122-1`
forky	Fixed	`2.29.90.20180122-1`
bullseye	Fixed	`2.29.90.20180122-1`
bookworm	Fixed	`2.29.90.20180122-1`

Application impact

Vendor	Product	Versions	Fixed
gnu	binutils	`2.29`

References

CWEs

CWE-119

Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.

Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.