CVE-2020-16599

Publication date 9 December 2020

Last updated 25 August 2025

Ubuntu priority

Cvss 3 Severity Score

Description

A Null Pointer Dereference vulnerability exists in the Binary File Descriptor (BFD) library (aka libbfd), as distributed in GNU Binutils 2.35, in _bfd_elf_get_symbol_version_string, as demonstrated in nm-new, that can cause a denial of service via a crafted file.

Status

Show unmaintained releases

Package	Ubuntu Release	Status
binutils	20.10 groovy	Not affected
	20.04 LTS focal	Not affected
	18.04 LTS bionic	Not affected
	16.04 LTS xenial	Not affected
	14.04 LTS trusty	Not affected

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=8d55d10ac0d112c586eaceb92e75bd9b80aadcc4

Severity score breakdown

CVSS version: CVSS v3.0

Base score 5.5 · Medium

Base metrics

Parameter	Value
Attack vector	Local
Attack complexity	Low
Privileges required	None
User interaction	Required
Scope	Unchanged
Confidentiality impact	None
Integrity impact	None
Availability impact	High

Scores

Parameter	Value
Base score	5.5 · Medium
Exploitability score	-
Impact score	-

Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H

References

Other references

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2020-16599