CVE-2025-69651

Publication date 6 March 2026

Last updated 13 April 2026

Ubuntu priority

Cvss 3 Severity Score

Description

GNU Binutils thru 2.46 readelf contains a vulnerability that leads to an invalid pointer free when processing a crafted ELF binary with malformed relocation or symbol data. If dump_relocations returns early due to parsing errors, the internal all_relocations array may remain partially uninitialized. Later, process_got_section_contents() may attempt to free an invalid r_symbol pointer, triggering memory corruption checks in glibc and causing the program to terminate with SIGABRT. No evidence of further memory corruption or code execution was observed; the impact is limited to denial of service. NOTE: this is disputed by third parties because the observed behavior occurred only in pre-release code and did not affect any tagged version.

Read the notes from the security team

Status

Show unmaintained releases

Package	Ubuntu Release	Status
binutils	25.10 questing	Vulnerable
	24.04 LTS noble	Vulnerable
	22.04 LTS jammy	Vulnerable
	20.04 LTS focal	Vulnerable
	18.04 LTS bionic	Vulnerable
	16.04 LTS xenial	Vulnerable
	14.04 LTS trusty	Vulnerable

Notes

seth-arnold

binutils isn't safe for untrusted inputs.

Patch details

For informational purposes only. We recommend not to cherry-pick updates. How can I get the fixes?

Package	Patch details
binutils	Upstream: https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git;h=ea4bc025abdba85a90e26e13f551c16a44bfa921 Upstream: https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git;h=81e90cf63a10ad11772c2437c8f2a88f1a00c739

Severity score breakdown

Parameter	Value
Base score	5.5 · Medium
Attack vector	Local
Attack complexity	Low
Privileges required	None
User interaction	Required
Scope	Unchanged
Confidentiality	None
Integrity impact	None
Availability impact	High
Vector	CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H