CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2018-8945 — Gnu Binutils security vulnerability

Medium CVSS 5.5

The bfd_section_from_shdr function in elf.c in the Binary File Descriptor (BFD) library (aka libbfd), as distributed in GNU Binutils 2.30, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (segmentation fault) via a large attribute section.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.0)
Published
2018-03-22
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-20

Affected products

  • gnu / binutils / 2.30
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_desktop / 7.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_server / 7.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux_workstation / 7.0

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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