CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-18521 — Elfutils Project Elfutils security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

Divide-by-zero vulnerabilities in the function arlib_add_symbols() in arlib.c in elfutils 0.174 allow remote attackers to cause a denial of service (application crash) with a crafted ELF file, as demonstrated by eu-ranlib, because a zero sh_entsize is mishandled.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2018-10-19
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-369

Affected products

  • elfutils_project / elfutils / 0.174
  • debian / debian_linux / 8.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 9.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_desktop / 7.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_server / 7.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_workstation / 7.0

Showing 6 representative product identities from 11 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.

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

The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.