CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2017-16832 — Gnu Binutils security vulnerability

High CVSS 7.8

The pe_bfd_read_buildid function in peicode.h in the Binary File Descriptor (BFD) library (aka libbfd), as distributed in GNU Binutils 2.29.1, does not validate size and offset values in the data dictionary, which allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (segmentation violation and application crash) or possibly have unspecified other impact via a crafted PE file.

Severity
High
CVSS
7.8 (3.0)
Published
2017-11-15
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-190

Affected products

  • gnu / binutils / 2.29.1

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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