CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-6844 — A flaw was found in the `readelf` utility of the binutils package

Medium CVSS 5.5

A flaw was found in the `readelf` utility of the binutils package. A local attacker could exploit two Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerabilities by providing a specially crafted Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) file. One vulnerability, a resource exhaustion (CWE-400), can lead to an out-of-memory condition. The other, a null pointer dereference (CWE-476), can cause a segmentation fault. Both issues can result in the `readelf` utility becoming unresponsive or crashing, leading to a denial of service.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.5 (3.1)
Published
2026-04-22
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-400

Affected products

  • gnu / binutils
  • redhat / hardened_images
  • redhat / openshift_container_platform / 4.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux / 7.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux / 8.0
  • redhat / enterprise_linux / 9.0

Showing 6 representative product identities from 7 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

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